Every day, people encounter messages designed to change their behavior. Buy this product. Eat healthier. Recycle more. Vote for this candidate. Some of these messages land, and some fall flat. Why does the same pitch convince one person but leave another completely unmoved? A growing body of research suggests the answer may lie in personality. A new systematic review of 80 studies, published in Personality and Individual Differences, finds that persuasion strategies tailored to a person’s personality traits are significantly more effective than generic, one-size-fits-all approaches. Perhaps more striking, the review also finds that mismatched strategies can actually make things worse.
The question behind the review
Scientists have studied persuasion for decades. Robert Cialdini’s well-known framework, for instance, identifies six broad persuasion principles: social proof (following what others do), liking (agreeing with people you find appealing), authority (deferring to experts), commitment and consistency (sticking to prior decisions), scarcity (wanting what’s rare), and reciprocity (returning favors). These strategies have been shown to work in diverse settings, from getting hotel guests to reuse towels to reducing littering in public spaces.
But not everyone responds the same way. Some people are easily swayed by a celebrity endorsement; others are completely indifferent to it. Researchers have increasingly wondered whether matching a specific persuasion technique to a person’s personality could make that technique more powerful. Sander Palm, a researcher at VU Amsterdam’s School of Business and Economics, along with co-author Maria Tims, set out to review and synthesize all the available evidence on this question.
The pair wanted to answer a straightforward but important question: What is the influence of personality traits on the effect of persuasion strategies on individual behavior? To do this, they needed a framework for describing personality. The most widely used model in psychology is the five-factor model, often called the “Big Five,” which categorizes personality along five dimensions. These are openness to experience (curiosity and imagination), conscientiousness (organization and reliability), extraversion (sociability and energy), agreeableness (kindness and cooperativeness), and neuroticism (anxiety and emotional sensitivity). Research suggests these traits are relatively stable over a person’s lifetime and have a genetic component of roughly 50 percent.
How the review was conducted
Palm and Tims followed the PRISMA methodology, a standardized protocol for conducting systematic literature reviews that is designed to increase transparency and quality. They searched the Web of Science database using combinations of keywords related to persuasion strategies and personality traits. This initial search turned up 236 unique articles. They then used a technique called snowballing, which involves scanning the reference lists of identified articles to find additional relevant studies. This added another 48 articles to the pool.
From there, the researchers screened the titles and abstracts, removing 83 articles that were irrelevant or not written in English. They then read the full text of the remaining 201 articles and excluded another 121 that did not meet the eligibility criteria. The final sample consisted of 80 articles, published between 1982 and September 2024, spanning 59 different journals. Each article was coded across 12 dimensions, including the type of persuasion strategy used, the research method, the domain (such as health or business), the study sample, and the results.
Most of the reviewed studies (91.25 percent) used quantitative methods, and the dominant research design was surveys (80 percent). The most commonly studied domains were health (41.25 percent) and business (25 percent). The general population was the most common target group, appearing in 62.5 percent of the studies.
Tailored messages outperform generic ones
The review’s first major finding concerns three categories of persuasion approaches. In a “matching” condition, a person receives a persuasion message tailored to their dominant personality trait. In a “contra-matching” condition, the person receives a strategy that was randomly selected and does not align with their personality. In a “non-matching” condition, no persuasion strategy is used at all.
Across the reviewed studies, matching strategies were frequently linked to greater effectiveness in changing attitudes or behavior compared with non-matching conditions. For example, one study found that American consumers responded more favorably to cellphone advertisements framed to align with their personality: extraverts responded to ads emphasizing social rewards, agreeable individuals responded to messages about family connection, and people high in neuroticism responded to ads focused on safety and security. Another study showed that political ads aligned with personality traits influenced both voting intentions and attitudes toward political parties.
The second finding was perhaps more surprising. Contra-matching strategies, where the persuasion approach does not fit the person’s personality, were not just ineffective. In multiple studies, they were actually counterproductive, producing worse outcomes than using no persuasion at all. This suggests that randomly applying persuasion techniques without considering the audience could do more harm than good, particularly in high-stakes areas like health messaging.
Some personality types are easier to persuade than others
The review’s second category of findings concerns overall susceptibility to persuasion. People who score high on agreeableness were consistently found to be the most responsive to persuasion strategies across studies. This aligns with the trait’s defining characteristics: cooperativeness, compliance, and a tendency to go along with others. One study found that agreeableness was among the traits most strongly linked to responsiveness to persuasion strategies in mental health applications. Another reported a positive connection between agreeableness and the perceived persuasiveness of arguments in a transportation context.
Extraversion was linked to above-average susceptibility. Extraverts tended to show greater responsiveness to persuasive features in mental health apps and were particularly engaged by gamified elements like points and leaderboards. Conscientiousness showed an average level of susceptibility. Openness to experience was generally linked to below-average susceptibility, though this varied by context. In educational settings, for instance, individuals high in openness were more receptive to motivational messages about learning a second language.
Neuroticism was associated with the lowest susceptibility to persuasion. Individuals high in neuroticism tend to be vigilant and wary, which may cause them to resist messages they perceive as intrusive. However, even this finding came with nuance. People high in neuroticism were more responsive to strategies based on social proof, where they could see what others were doing. The behavior of the group apparently provided a form of reassurance that offset their typical wariness.
Which strategies work for which personality types
The review’s most granular finding maps specific Cialdini persuasion strategies to each of the Big Five traits. For people high in agreeableness, reciprocity and liking were the most effective approaches. This makes intuitive sense: kind, cooperative people respond well to kindness in return and to messages from people they find likeable.
Extraverts were responsive to multiple strategies, including liking, commitment and consistency, scarcity, and reciprocity. Notably, social proof and authority did not significantly influence extraverts, possibly because their strong social networks make them less reliant on outside validation.
For conscientious individuals, reciprocity was the standout strategy, likely because their strong sense of duty compels them to return favors. Liking was the least effective approach, perhaps because people high in conscientiousness tend to be less swayed by non-rational appeals.
Openness to experience did not match well with any single strategy, though social proof, liking, commitment and consistency, and authority appeared to be at a slight disadvantage compared with scarcity and reciprocity. People high in neuroticism were most likely to respond to commitment and consistency, which encourages sticking with prior decisions. Scarcity also showed a positive relationship, possibly because the fear of missing out resonates strongly with anxious individuals.
What this means for businesses and organizations
The review offers a practical, three-step framework for anyone looking to apply these findings. The first step is to understand the personality profiles of a target audience, since applying persuasion strategies at random carries a real risk of backfiring. The second step is to assess the overall susceptibility of that audience to set realistic expectations and allocate resources accordingly. The third step is to either select the single best persuasion strategy for a broad group, one that resonates with the majority without alienating anyone, or to tailor messages to subgroups or individuals when possible.
In a business context, a company trying to sell sustainable products could use personality data to craft messages emphasizing reciprocity for agreeable customers (“We gave back to your community; now try our product”) or scarcity for those high in neuroticism (“Only a limited supply remains”). In health campaigns, understanding that neurotic individuals resist most messaging but respond to social proof could help public health officials design more effective interventions.
The review also raises important caveats. Most of the included studies relied on self-reported personality assessments, which can be skewed by social desirability bias, the tendency to answer questions in ways that make oneself look good. The vast majority of studies were also brief, typically under one hour, leaving open the question of whether the effects hold over longer periods. The research is also largely correlational, meaning it shows associations between personality traits and persuasion outcomes rather than proving that one directly causes the other. And cultural context may play a role: a strategy that works in an individualistic culture may not work the same way in a collectivist one.
Still, the volume of evidence across 80 studies, multiple domains, and diverse populations points in a consistent direction: when it comes to changing behavior, knowing your audience’s personality is not just useful information. It may be the difference between a message that persuades and one that pushes people further away.
