Attending to individual recipients' knowledge when generating persuasive analogies

Abstract

When addressing the general population, experts and novices ground analogical arguments on culturally shared situations. No studies, however, have assessed the extent to which the analogies used in person-to-person exchanges relate to the background knowledge of their intended recipient. In Experiment 1, two groups of psychology students received a description of a patient seeking psychological assistance. They were tasked with generating analogies to dissuade her from embarking on a short therapy, on the grounds that such therapies leave the underlying causes unchanged. While one of the groups was asked to analogise to the knowledge background of the patient, the other group was not given such indication. Results showed that even though participants can adjust their analogies to their addressees upon explicit request, they rarely do it spontaneously. Experiment 2 yielded similar results despite a more vivid presentation of the critical information about the recipient. A final study showed that a sample of the same population regards tailored analogies as being more persuasive than non-tailored analogies, thus confirming that participants of the first two experiments selected analogies that were less appropriate than other types of analogies that they are capable of generating.