Effects of self-relevant perspective-taking on the impact of persuasive appeals

Donation appeals often describe the situations that confront victims of misfortune and advertisements for consumer products often show people using the products being promoted. When people consider these messages from the perspective of the individuals described in them, they often imagine the reactions they would have if they personally experienced the situation described. When this occurs, they are likely to be influenced by the messages independently of the protagonists' characteristics. When recipients' attention is drawn to themselves, however, they compare themselves with the protagonists to determine whether the protagonists' actions or the situation described in the message have implications for their own behavior. This self-focused attention increases the impact of the message when they are similar to the protagonists, decreases its impact when they are moderately dissimilar, and has no effect at all when they are very dissimilar to the protagonists. Two experiments, in which participants' self-focused attention, the type of persuasive appeal (self-referential vs. impersonal), and protagonist-participant similarity were independently manipulated, confirmed these effects on the impact of both (a) an appeal for monetary donations to a charity and (b) a commercial advertisement.