The Application of Persuasion Theory to the Development Of Effective Proenvironmental Public Service Announcements

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Renee J. Bator, Robert B. Cialdini

In addition to this three-step guideline, there are some general suggestions for campaign designers. The message content should be very specific. As Pratkanis and Greenwald (1993) found, messages that describe how to solve specific problems are more likely to be attended to, as they have been found to break through the message-dense environment. The message should explain precisely how a behavior change should occur, and this explanation should be vivid and involving without having vivid and distracting additional information. The message should include an encoding cue (Keller, 1987) that will definitely be present in the upcoming behavioral setting. This cue should be tied to the main point of the message so that motivation is activated perhaps by providing a descriptive and/or an injunctive norm (Cialdini, Reno, & Kallgren, 1990). This cue will increase the likelihood that the audience will recall the message and act in accord with it at the appropriate point in time.

Atkin and Freimuth provide an excellent checklist for evaluating an initial campaign plan, and combined with McGuire's input/output axis the two provide a thorough guideline for proenvironmental communication developers. If the campaign developer tests the message using these checklists and finds that the message is effective at each stage of the checklists, then not only will the central route to persuasion be incorporated, but the message is much more likely to be effective, which is the most desirable quality of a proenvironmental (or any other) PSA.

(*.) Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Renee Bator, Psychology Department, 101 Broad Street, SUNY Plattsburgh, Plattsburgh, NY 12901 [e-mail: renee.bator@plattshurgh.edu].

RENEE BATOR earned her undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She earned her master's and doctoral degrees from the Social Psychology program at Arizona State University. She is an Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, where she teaches classes in social psychology, research methods, and statistics. Her research interests include the application of persuasion theory to prosocial outcomes.

ROBERT CIALDINI received undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate education in Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, the University of North Carolina, and Columbia University, respectively. He has held Visiting Scholar appointments at Ohio State University, the Universities of California at San Diego and Santa Cruz, the Annenberg School of Communications, and both the Psychology Department and the Graduate School of Business of Stanford University. He is currently Regents' Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University, where he has also been named Distinguished Graduate Research Professor. He has been elected president of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology and of the Personality and Social Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association.