How do arousal-inducing contexts, such as frightening or romantic television programs, influence the effectiveness of basic persuasion strategies? Three different theoretical models make different predictions: (1) A general arousal model predicts that arousal should increase effectiveness of basic heuristic strategies, (2) an affective valence model predicts that effectiveness should depend on whether the context elicits positive or negative feelings, and (3) an evolutionary model predicts that persuasiveness should depend on both the specific emotion that is elicited and the information contained in the particular persuasion appeal.
Three experiments examine how eliciting the emotions of fear versus romantic desire influences the effectiveness of two widely used persuasion heuristics—social proof (e.g., most popular product) and scarcity (e.g., limited-edition product). The results support predictions from an evolutionary model. Consistent with the underlying fitness-enhancing function of fear, this emotion leads social proof appeals to be more persuasive. However, fear causes scarcity appeals to be counterpersuasive. This means that people in a state of fear are motivated to follow the crowd (to blend in), but they are especially hesitant to stick out and be different. In contrast to fear, romantic desire produces the opposite pattern of findings. Consistent with the underlying fitness-enhancing function of romantic desire, romantic desire leads scarcity appeals to be more persuasive, but it causes social proof appeals to be counterpersuasive. This means that a state of romantic desire leads people to want to be distinct and unique and makes it especially unappealing to follow the crowd.
Theoretically, these findings highlight how an evolutionary approach can lead to novel theoretical and practical marketing insights. The findings also have potential practical implications for advertising practice and the strategic placement of advertisements and products. For example, although television advertisers traditionally rely on viewer demographic information to determine where and when to purchase airtime, the model developed in this article suggests that advertisers should consider the content of the specific program during which their advertisements will air and should consider such issues in a more textured and less obvious way. For example, while touting the uniqueness of a product might be effective during a program that elicits romantic desire, the same advertisement aired during a fear-eliciting program, such as the fear-eliciting local news, might actually make the product unappealing. A related possibility is that advertisements themselves might be used to elicit specific emotions (rather than general positive or negative affect) in a strategic way. For example, the first 15 seconds of a television spot could be strategically crafted to elicit a specific emotion; this emotion could then make the persuasion appeal in the advertisement more persuasive.
Biography
Vladas Griskevicius is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. His research interests are in the area of evolutionary consumer behavior, which uses principles from evolutionary biology to study people’s (often unconscious) preferences, decision processes, and behavioral strategies.
Noah J. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior in the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include compliance tactics, social norms, incentives, consumer decision making, and the role of psychological closeness in judgments of the self and others.
Chad R. Mortensen is a doctoral student in Psychology at Arizona State University. His research interests include motivated biases and self-regulation in cognition and behavior.
Jill M. Sundie is Assistant Professor of Marketing and Entrepreneurship at the University of Houston’s C.T. Bauer School of Business. Her research focuses on integrating evolutionary psychology with consumer behavior theory, including applying aspects of evolutionary theory to study conspicuous consumption, consumer choice, social influence processes, behavioral economics, and negative consumption-related emotions (e.g., schadenfreude).
Robert B. Cialdini is the Graduate College Distinguished Research Professor and Regents’ Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. His research interests include persuasion and compliance, altruism, and the tactics of favorable self-presentation.
Douglas T. Kenrick is Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University. His research interests include integrating models from evolutionary biology and cognitive science to study the effects of fundamental social motivations (e.g., self-protection, status, mate search) on basic cognitive processes (e.g., attention to, encoding of, and memory for different people in a rapidly presented crowd).
J Marketing Research, Volume 46, Number 3, June 2009
View Table of Contents.