Enhancing public campaign messages: The power of causal arguments

Abstract

Campaign messages are often issued by government and international agencies to persuade the public to adopt certain standpoints or take actions related to public issues. However, there is a paucity of empirical research investigating how to improve the messages to increase adoption—from an information and argumentation perspective. This study developed a model of public campaign message adoption based on an argumentation perspective and the information adoption model, and investigated how different types of causal argument elements contribute to the adoption intention of public campaign messages. Two within-subject online experiments with fictitious and real scenarios were conducted, and Bayesian hierarchical modeling that treated participant and scenario as random factors were employed in the data analysis. The results indicate that two types of argument support elements (i.e., support to the data and support to the bridging premise) significantly increased the adoption intention of campaign messages in different scenarios. Additionally, the argument support to the bridging premise exhibited a bigger effect than the support to the data. Finally, their effects on adoption intention were fully mediated by perceived argument strength and source credibility of the campaign messages. This study sheds light on how to design more persuasive campaign messages related to public issues.