Abstract
Objective: Persuasive messages regarding fruit and vegetable consumption often meet defensive reactions from recipients, which may lower message effectiveness. Individual differences in emotion regulation and gender are expected to predict these reactions. In the working memory account of persuasion, inducing voluntary eye movements during the processing of the auditory persuasive information might prevent defensiveness and thereby increase message effectiveness.Methods: Participants in two independently recruited samples from the general population (n = 118 and n = 99) listened to a negatively framed auditory persuasive message advocating fruit and vegetable consumption. Half of them were asked to keep following a regularly moving stimulus on their screen with their eyes. At pretest, the individual differences of cognitive self-affirmation inclination (CSAI) and gender were assessed to predict defensive reactions.Results: In Study 1, induced eye movements significantly increased self-reported consumption after 2 weeks when CSAI was low, but only in males, as indicated by a significant three-way interaction (p < 0.001). With negative self-evaluative emotions as dependent variable, this three-way interaction was also significant (p < 0.05), suggesting that induced eye movements prevented defensiveness in low CSAI males. Study 2 did not assess consumption but replicated the latter three-way interaction (p < 0.05).Conclusion: The studies replicated our earlier findings regarding the moderating effects of individual differences in emotion regulation (i.e., CSAI) on persuasion, but they also revealed gender differences in persuasion that are related to the working memory. The working memory account of persuasion provides new theoretical as well as practical angles on persuasion to target individuals in persuasion to increase fruit and vegetable consumption.
Highlights
In the framework of health promotion, the proven relationship between fruit and vegetable consumption on the one hand, and cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and all-cause mortality on the other hand (Aune et al, 2013), might be translated into health messages directed at the general public
With regard to messages and interventions that advocate fruit and vegetable consumption, several studies suggest or identify such detrimental reactions (Epton and Harris, 2008; Dijkstra et al, 2011; Pietersma and Dijkstra, 2011b; Thompson and Kumar, 2011; Elbert and Dijkstra, 2014; Ungar et al, 2015; Fielden et al, 2016; van Koningsbruggen et al, 2016). As these defensive reactions can lower the effectiveness of persuasive messages regarding fruit and vegetable consumption, they may be partly responsible for the high proportion of people that does not consume fruit and vegetables according the guidelines (Lee-Kwan et al, 2017; Eurostat Statistics Explained, 2020)
Our studies suggest that the intention of people with low cognitive self-affirmation inclination” (CSAI) was actively lowered by defensive self-regulatory actions (Pietersma and Dijkstra, 2011a)
Summary
In the framework of health promotion, the proven relationship between fruit and vegetable consumption on the one hand, and cardiovascular diseases, cancer, and all-cause mortality on the other hand (Aune et al, 2013), might be translated into health messages directed at the general public. With regard to messages and interventions that advocate fruit and vegetable consumption, several studies suggest or identify such detrimental reactions (Epton and Harris, 2008; Dijkstra et al, 2011; Pietersma and Dijkstra, 2011b; Thompson and Kumar, 2011; Elbert and Dijkstra, 2014; Ungar et al, 2015; Fielden et al, 2016; van Koningsbruggen et al, 2016) As these defensive reactions can lower the effectiveness of persuasive messages regarding fruit and vegetable consumption, they may be partly responsible for the high proportion of people that does not consume fruit and vegetables according the guidelines (Lee-Kwan et al, 2017; Eurostat Statistics Explained, 2020). These cognitive self-regulatory actions may consist of processes that reject the persuasive message or processes that direct the behavior toward a solution in line with the persuasive message (Witte, 1992)
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