Improved persuasive design: Matching personal traits and inducing effortful thinking

摘要

Previous research indicated that persuasive messages contain appeals that match readers' personal traits can change people's attitudes more. However, the relationship between culture matching and the Elaboration Likelihood Model, which is closely related to people's attitudes, is still a question to be studied. Our study specifically focuses on the mechanism behind matching the individualism-collectivism difference in cultural values. We expect that inconsistent contents would induce more effortful thinking than consistent contents, which will make customers favor the messages. The results showed that the cultural value matching and inconsistent information induce more positive attitudes than others. Especially, participants low in collectivism showed more positive attitudes to the inconsistent (vs. consistent) contents only for collectivistic advertisement, which partially supported our hypothesis. These findings may be useful in persuasive design, especially to the users without more personalized information.