Hung Iris W, Wyer Robert S
1National University of Singapore.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2014 Mar;40(3):402-14. doi: 10.1177/0146167213513474. Epub 2013 Dec 5.
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.
捐赠呼吁通常会描述不幸受害者所面临的情况，而消费品广告常常展示人们使用所推销产品的场景。当人们从这些信息中所描述的个体角度去考虑时，他们常常会想象如果自己亲身经历所描述的情况会有怎样的反应。当这种情况发生时，他们很可能会不受主角特征的影响而受到这些信息的左右。然而，当接收者将注意力集中到自己身上时，他们会将自己与主角进行比较，以确定主角的行为或信息中所描述的情况是否对自己的行为有启示。当他们与主角相似时，这种自我关注会增加信息的影响力；当他们与主角有一定差异时，信息的影响力会降低；而当他们与主角非常不同时，信息则完全没有影响。两项实验独立操纵了参与者的自我关注、说服性呼吁的类型（自我参照型与非个人型）以及主角与参与者的相似性，证实了这些因素对（a）向慈善机构进行金钱捐赠的呼吁和（b）商业广告的影响力均有上述影响。
