Brain activity reveals what makes persuasive messages stick
A new study by the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication and colleagues reveals that activity in brain regions associated with reward and social processing can predict the effectiveness of messages.
2 min. read
Neuroscientists have shown that looking at how people’s brains respond to persuasive messages in TV advertisements or newspaper articles can help reveal how these messages change minds or behavior. A new study aims to determine if the same brain processes can be linked to message effectiveness across diverse formats, such as YouTube videos, health campaigns, and newspaper articles.
In a new study published in PNAS Nexus, researchers pooled data from over 500 individual participants across 16 functional MRI studies that investigated brain responses to, and the effectiveness of, persuasive messages across various contexts that clude public health campaigns, crowdfunding sites, movie trailers, and YouTube videos. They found that, on average across these diverse contexts, activity in brain regions linked to reward and social processing can predict how effective messages will be.
To make this work possible, Emily Falk, director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Climate Communication Division, Christin Scholz, and others, brought together and led an international team of interdisciplinary scholars who contributed their data and expertise.
“Existing theories had suggested that decision-making is driven by brain activity in predictable brain systems,” says Falk, a professor of communication, psychology, marketing, operations, informatics, and decisions. “One associated with personal rewards, and the other related to understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings—a process known as mentalizing.”
Yet, thus far, these predictions had only been tested independently in individual contexts such as marketing or public health. Identifying commonalities in the processes that are persuasive across these domains could reveal efficient ways in which scholars and practitioners from marketing, health, political, and entertainment communication might collaborate to enhance their messages.
When examining brain regions associated with emotion, the researchers were surprised to find that activity in these regions showed associations with message effectiveness at a large scale, but did not predict message effects on the individuals whose brains were scanned.
“These findings are in line with the idea that lower-level responses to messages, especially on an emotional or interpersonal level, may be more universal and thus more generalizable from individual brains to larger groups across message domains,” Scholz says. The study’s results provide insights into how communicators can craft more impactful messages and highlight opportunities for researchers to work together across disciplines to understand and target common mechanisms that make messages more effective, the researchers say.
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