April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: Adding Hope to Enhance Persuasion: The Effect of “Guilt-to-Hope” Appeals on Discouraging Texting while Driving
Recent research has begun to investigate the utility of incorporating both positive and negative motivational emotions in persuasive appeals to promote persuasive outcomes (e.g., Carrera et al., 2010; Nabi & Green, 2015; Nabi & Myrick, 2019; Myrick & Oliver, 2015). Nevertheless, most of them focused on fear-based persuasion and few works have investigated the utility of combining positive emotions with other negative emotional appeals, such as guilt appeals. Our study aims to contribute to the literature on mixed emotional appeals by investigating the effectiveness of hybrid “guilt-hope” appeals versus standard guilt appeals in influencing attitudes and intentions regarding texting while driving (TWD), as well as the mechanisms under these effects. We aim to achieve the three main goals: 1) understand whether and how people emotionally process hybrid appeals differently than standard guilt appeals, 2) assess the utility of the hybrid appeals in counteracting the defensive responses to standard guilt appeals with high language intensity, and 3) explore the interaction between intended emotional responses and defensive responses. To test our hypotheses, our study employed a 2 (Types: Guilt-only vs. hybrid) x 2 (Language intensity: Low vs. High) between-subjects design. Except the relative language intensity level of guilt and the presence/absence of hope varies, all elements (e.g., visual images) in the stimuli were held constant across the experimental conditions. The language intensity was manipulated by using varying levels of freedom-threatening headlines and phrases. For the hybrid appeal condition, messages that emphasized quitting TWD “saves lives” as well as effective strategies to quit TWD were added to increase hope. An online recruitment service was used to recruit 399 participants. The conditional process modeling of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) (Hayes & Preacher, 2013; Stride et al., 2015) in Mplus (version 7.4) was used for analysis. The study results showed that compared to standard guilt appeals, hybrid appeals resulted in lower levels of inferences of manipulative intent, p = .004), regardless of language intensity. Inferences of manipulative intent were negatively related to attitudes (p < .001) and intentions to quit TWD (p = .08). In addition, defensive responses directly influenced the levels of intended emotional responses, as well as moderated the relationship between appeal types and intended emotional responses. Specifically, inferences of manipulative intent resulted in lower levels of guilt (p = .004). Furthermore, hybrid appeals resulted in higher levels of hope than standard guilt appeals when inferences of manipulative intent were moderate (p = .004) and anger at the advertiser was low (p = .01). Our study was the first to propose and test a model that was intended to investigate the mechanisms under the effectiveness of hybrid “guilt-hope” appeals on attitudes and intention to quit TWD. Our findings showed that hybrid appeals were less likely to evoke defensive responses. Lower levels of defensive responses, in turn, evoked higher levels of intended emotional responses and improved attitudes and intentions to quit TWD.