When Arguments Meet a Story: An Experiment Testing Message Design Strategies for Skin Cancer Prevention and Detection

ABSTRACT

Persuasion research often suggests combining different message formats such as facts, statistics, and narratives in message design to maximize persuasive effects. However, the effect of the combination, especially between fact-based arguments and long-form narratives, varies depending on many factors which have been understudied. Our study therefore tested how argument strength, argument position, and target behavior interacted in impacting behavioral outcomes for such a combined message about skin cancer. Findings from our experiment revealed a significant three-way interaction, as weak arguments were more effective when embedding them in a long-form narrative, whereas strong arguments were more impactful when placing them before the narrative. Such an interaction emerged only when messages recommended sunscreen use but not when recommending skin-self exams. We discussed the implications of the findings for message design about skin cancer prevention and detection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2024.2315320

Notes

1. Rothman et al. (2006) employed the term “prevention-/promotion-oriented mind-set” in their article and suggested a fit between a detection behavior and the prevention-oriented mind-set, as well as between a prevention behavior and the promotion-oriented mind-set. However, to avoid potential confusion in terminology, we opted for “risk-averse/opportunity-seeking mind-set,” which can be used interchangeably with “prevention-/promotion-oriented mind-set.”

2. We followed the recommendation from Hauser et al. (2019) for using MTurk as a research platform and required workers to have a HIT acceptance ratio of 95% or higher and to locate in the United States.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a faculty research grant from the School of Communication at Florida International University.