The Effects of Guilt-Appeal Intensity on Persuasive and Emotional Outcomes: The Moderating Role of Sponsor Motive

ABSTRACT

Studies examining the persuasive effects of guilt appeals have yielded mixed results. The current study hypothesizes that source motive (profit versus not for profit) is a key moderating variable underlying these inconsistences. A controlled experiment tested the moderating role of sponsor motive on the relationship between guilt-appeal intensity and persuasiveness of the appeal and ad liking. Findings confirmed the notion that sponsor motive moderates the effects of guilt appeals: When guilt appeals are commercially oriented there is a relative failure of high-intensity guilt appeals compared to moderate-intensity guilt appeals. Moderate-intensity guilt appeals cause more-positive brand attitudes than high-intensity appeals. Yet, when guilt appeals are nonprofit, increases in intensity of guilt communicated lead to positive results. As the guilt-intensity increased, ad liking and persuasiveness increased. It appears that guilt-appeal intensity did not have an effect on brand attitudes when the message was nonprofit.

KEYWORDS:

• Anger
• emotional appeals
• guilt
• guilt appeals
• persuasion

Notes

1. One consistent limitation to all studies of guilt appeals regards the notion of what is and is not “high, moderate, or low” intensity. Scholars have generally used language intensity to manipulate more or less guilt. Thus, we will continue to refer to “higher” and “lower” guilt to reflect the idea that the intensity of the appeal is relative and not an objective feature of a message (e.g., the font is large or small).

2. Lindsey (2005) employed Hong & Faedda’s (1996) reactance scale to measure reactance, which does not explicitly call out angry feelings.

3. Basil et al. (2006, 2008) found that reactance might be mitigated by including messages of efficacy and/or empathy in guilt appeals or as appeals used to generate guilt. We find this to be a significant advancement in understanding the process of guilt on persuasion. Here, however, our goal was to control for efficacy by holding it constant and to isolate source motive as another potential moderating factor.

4. In this study we held efficacy constant in all conditions. Other scholars have found efficacy to be an important consideration in guilt appeals (Basil et al., 2008; Lindsey, 2005). However, our focus was on isolating the effects of source motive, all other things being equal.

5. We will not include a manipulation for “profit” versus “not for profit” because we assert that this is an intrinsic feature of the message versus a perceptual feature (O’Keefe, 2003). What we mean by this is that the for-profit messages explicitly used the word “buy,” as in “buy” this Spartan (brand) bag. The not-for-profit message stated, “Use” reusable bags (any brand).” We didn’t want to alert participants to this difference and make it salient—thereby biasing our results. Rather, we wanted to see if the difference in this intrinsic feature affected outcomes.