6.4: Common Motivational Appeals

Common Motivational Appeals

Fear

Your childhood was likely full of fear appeals. "You're going to break your neck!" "You'll shoot your eye out!" "If you keep making that face, it's going to stay that way!" As adults, we still encounter a lot of fear appeals, some more subtle than others. Public service announcements frequently incorporate fear appeals; we've probably all seen the "this is your brain on drugs" message. "Fear taps into our primal concerns for survival, making us more apt to take action" (Lindstrom 29). Fear appeals "increase advertising’s effect on consumer interest, recall, persuasiveness, and behavior change" (Williams).

According to the extended parallel process model, when people are faced with a threat, the first thing they do is determine if the threat is severe enough to warrant action and determine if they are susceptible to a threat. For example, although the threat of testicular cancer is quite real, as a woman, I am not susceptible to it, so chances are I would ignore that threat. If we perceive that a threat is severe and that we are susceptible to the threat, the next thing we do is assess whether we believe that the recommended behavior, course of action, or product will prevent or reduce the threat. This is referred to as response efficacy. If we believe we are capable of doing the recommended behavior or obtaining the recommended product, etc., we believe we have high self-efficacy. Fear appeals work when people believe the threat is severe, relevant, and that they are in a position to do something about the threat.

There are some caveats for fear appeals, however. Too much fear can be viewed by audiences as manipulative, and when fear appeals are presented in conjunction with disgusting images, "aversive activation reaches a point where there is some defensive withdrawal of cognitive resources from encoding a message" (Leshner et al 86). In other words, fear combined with disgusting images can lead people to a defensive avoidance response; they simply stop paying attention to the message. (Again, people typically avoid negative things.) People distance themselves from too much emotional discomfort. Fear appeals also fail if people do not perceive the threat to be real or relevant, if they do not believe the response advocated for will work, or if they do not believe they are capable of executing the requested response.

Humor

Who doesn't love a good laugh? But does laughter and/or humor lead to persuasion? Humor is defined as a psychological response characterized by the appraisal that something is funny, the positive emotion of amusement, and the tendency to laugh (Warren et al.). An analysis of 369 correlations between humor and advertising found that humor increases brand recognition, brand attitudes, and audience attention (Eisend 191). Humor does not appear to impact cognitive processes, having neither positive nor negative effects on message processing. Interestingly, the analysis found that the overall effect of humor on credibility is negative (Eisend 200). A more recent study analyzed specific types of humor, including incongruity resolution, tension relief, and humorous self-disparagement and how they affect the perceived warmth and competence of an organization. Incongruity resolution improves competence but only when consumers can resolve the incongruity. Tension relief enhances a company's warmth. Humorous self-disparagement reduces impressions of competence, while other-disparagement reduces both warmth and competence (Hoang et al.).

Life experiences teaches us that people have wildly different senses of humor, so it stands to reason that what one person finds hilarious another might find offensive. One must exercise caution when using humor appeals. Furthermore, Walter et al. found that there is no effect for people using humor in health communications, which isn't terribly surprising, given that most people take their health pretty seriously (365).

Sex

We've probably all heard the adage that "sex sells". But does it? A sexual appeals is a “persuasion attempt that uses words, images and/or actions by models to evoke sexual thoughts, feelings, and/or arousal in a target audience” (Wirtz et al. 169). Advertising research reveals that "sexual appeals are attention-getting, arousing, affect-inducing, and memorable" (Reichert et al. 1). In social marketing campaigns, sexual appeals that are relevant, free of sexism, and appealing to both genders are persuasive: "sexual appeals are attention-getting, likeable, dynamic, and somewhat more apt to increase interest in the topic than are nonsexual appeals. In a saturated media environment, the ability to attract favorable attention and interest to the message is vital" (Reichert et al. 13).

In a more recent study specific to social media advertising, it was found that "an ad using sex appeal and a control ad without sex appeal for the same brand ran on Facebook for the same 5-day period. Results indicated the sex appeal ad outperformed the control ad in terms of engagement but not in actual sales" (Stewart et al. 701). Yet another study found that people remembered the sexual content of ads but not the brands associated with them, citing the evolutionary emotional arousal theory as explanation: "cognitive overload caused by sexual content should lead to poorer recall of all details that do not contain sexual content because individuals have an evolutionary pre-disposition to attend to evolutionarily significant cues like sex" (Lawrence et al.) It would appear that, although sexual appeals are liked, remembered, and attention-getting, evidence is scant that they lead to long-term behavior or attitude change.

Hope

Hope has been found to be an important coping strategy when facing adversities, as hope is positively associated with individual resilience, psychological well-being, as well as decreased depression and distress (Tao et al. 3). A hope appeal is a message strategy that attempts to persuade people to adopt a specific action by arousing hope. Hope has the potential to persuade people to adopt various behaviors. Indeed, Chadwick defines hope as a discrete, future-oriented emotion that can motivate people’s behavior by focusing their thoughts on opportunities to achieve future rewards (Chadwick ).

Hope is not only a coping strategy for reducing stress, anxiety, and the psychological effects of adversity, but can also serve as a pivotal resource to facilitate goal-directed actions, including broadening one's openness to different perspectives and thus persuasion (Tao et al. 3). How does hope work? It turns out that emotions affect our susceptibility to misinformation. Depression is associated with beliefs in both misinformation and conspiracy theories. Anger can make us susceptible to anger-inducing rumors, and anxiety increases our reliance upon the information environment, making partisanship more believable (Tao et al. 2). Fear is no friend to information processing, as fear generates the desire to alleviate or avoid threat, thus making people more vulnerable to misinformation.

In a study relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, Tao et al. found that hope appeals reduce misconceptions to a similar degree as factual correction. Of considerable note, however, is how hope appeals and factual corrections differ in the presence of a threat. Not only to hope appeals induce more positive feelings than simple factual rebuttals, but hope appeals appear to be more sensitive to threat, and hope appeals in combination (i.e., words of optimistic outlook, individual efficacy, and collective/group efficacy) are powerful. Particularly during threats to public health, deploying the combined version of hope appeal corrections is very promising in counteracting misperception-inducing threats and fear (Tao et al. 9).

Pity

The Sarah McLachlan ASPCA ad, mentioned earlier in this chapter, is an iconic example of the pity appeal. But what, exactly, is pity? When we see someone (or something) experiencing distress, pain, or misfortune, we humans tend to feel compassion, sympathy, or sorrow. When we see suffering, especially among those who cannot help themselves, we tend to want to alleviate that suffering. Witnessing such things causes most people to feel sad, frustrated, or regret for the situation.

The classical rhetoricians deemed the appeal to pity to be a logical fallacy, argumentum ad misericordiam (Walton 1). Many philosophers believed – and continue to believe – that appealing to emotions such as pity and fear bypasses our ability to think. Furthermore, some believe that, because pity is so susceptible to manipulation, it is highly suspect and never a valid justification for action.

Others, however, argue that pity itself isn't bad. Imagine not feeling sorrow or distress in the presence of suffering! Perhaps, rather, emotion should not be excluded from reason, "since our emotions are often informative and are sometimes more reliable guides to action than argument" (Kimball 302).

Whether one sees pity as a logical fallacy or a reliable guide to action, there is no denying its power as a persuasive appeal. GoFundMe campaigns, which often appeal to compassion and sympathy, have raised over $30 billion dollars since 2010, with giving spikes noted on or around distressing events, such as the day Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on live television and in the days following the Uvalde, Texas school shooting (Beaty).