Guilt Appeals in Persuasive Communication: A Meta-Analytic Review

ABSTRACT

Research examining the effects of guilt appeals on attitudes and behavioral intentions has been inconsistent. Some scholars have found that guilt appeal intensity has a curvilinear relationship with attitudes and intentions, whereas others have reported that the relationship is linear. Random-effects meta-analysis (k = 26) was used to investigate this issue. More intense guilt appeals led to greater levels of perceived guilt (r = .29, k = 24). Meta-regression analyses showed that the amount of perceived guilt caused by guilt appeals was not linearly nor curvilinearly related to the impact of guilt appeal intensity on attitudes/behavioral intentions. Guilt appeals did, however, cause feelings of anger (r = .24, k = 8). The implications of these findings for guilt scholarship are considered.

KEYWORDS:

• Guilt
• emotional appeals
• persuasion
• marketing
• anger

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Boster et al.’s study regards guilt as an a-priori state that may impact compliance, operationalized as behavioral compliance or helping behavior (signing a petition). The current study is explicitly an examination of the use of guilt-appeals as a persuasive message device.

2. Research reports included in the meta-analysis can also be found at https://osf.io/qy6pd/.

3. Because the meta package only produces unstandardized meta-regression coefficients, the SPSS macro developed by Wilson (2010) was used to estimate standardized coefficients for this and the remaining meta-regression analyses.

4. We conducted two sets of post-hoc analyses to further evaluate H2a and H2b. One set involved including perceived anger as a covariate. There were 8 cases that included sufficient information to retest H2a and H2b with anger as a covariate in both meta-regression models. The results did not change; perceived guilt was not associated with the effects of appeal intensity on attitudes/behavioral intentions. The second set of post-hoc analyses were conducted using an alternate measure of perceived guilt. We constructed a metric involving the amount of guilt perceived in the experimental group relative to the scale maximum in each case (guilt amount = mean/scale max). The results related to H2a and H2b again did not change.

5. Figures can be found at https://osf.io/qy6pd/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Monique Turner

Monique Turner Turner is Professor and Chairperson of Communication at Michigan State University. Her research examines health communication, social influence, and the role of emotion in attitude change.

Stephen Rains

Stephen Rains is Professor of Communication at the University of Arizona. His research examines health communication, social influence, and communication and technology.