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Guilt appeals are increasingly being used in road safety campaigns, despite recent research that has raised doubts about their effectiveness and the potential for triggering defensive responses. Building on the extended parallel process model, this study aims to add to this growing body of research by evaluating whether combining a hope message with guilt appeals can solve this problem.

An online experiment with a 2 (Appeal type: Guilt vs Guilt+hope) × 2 (Language intensity: Low vs High) between-subjects design was conducted. A total of 399 participants recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk were randomized to view one of the four advertisements discouraging texting while driving (TWD). Their affective responses, perceptions about the advertisements and intentions to not TWD were measured.

The results showed that compared to guilt-only appeals, guilt+hope appeals directly reduced defensive responses (i.e. perceived manipulative intent and anger) across varying levels of language intensity. In addition, guilt+hope appeals mitigated the negative impacts of manipulative intent on intended emotions and intentions to not TWD.

Findings of this study mark the first to support the idea that communicating hope within guilt appeals is a promising social marketing strategy to discourage TWD.

Narrative comments about dentists on physician review sites have been documented to increasingly influence people's selection of their dentists. From a communication standpoint, these comments are a type of narrative communication that people share their experiences with dentists by telling stories. Based on the frameworks of rhetoric structure theory and extended elaborated likelihood model, this study aimed to examine the effects of such storytelling from two perspectives including narrative structure and narrative focus.

A 4 (narrative structure) × 2 (narrative focus) between-subjects experiment was conducted to examine the proposed hypotheses and research questions

The results showed that a one-sided comprehensive comment focusing on technical competence generated the strongest persuasion effects measured by attitude and behavioral intention. These effects were mediated by perceived narrative credibility and enjoyment.

This study contributes to the extant literature in two ways. First, it extends previous studies of online narrative comments by showing which narrative structure and focus are deemed to be more persuasive when selecting a dentist. Second, it offers a test of two routes of information processing (i.e. cognitive and experiential) to understand the mechanism underlying the effects of narrative comments.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2020-0359