Rethink your global strategy: Research reveals when to lead with the heart or the head

Should a company’s advertising campaign appeal to the heart or to the head? This is a fundamental question for anyone trying to persuade an audience, from marketing executives to public health officials.

A team of researchers recently explored this question on a global scale, investigating whether emotional or logical appeals are more effective in different cultures. Their work, published in the Journal of Communication, suggests that the best approach may depend on a society’s cultural values.

Appeals to the Heart and Head

The investigation was motivated by an observation in global communication. While people are constantly exposed to messages designed to change their minds, from social media ads to interpersonal requests, it has not been clear whether appeals targeting emotions work better than those targeting beliefs across different societies. Researchers Wei Jie Reiner Ng, Ya Hui Michelle See, and Mike W.-L. Cheung at the National University of Singapore saw an opportunity to synthesize existing research to look for a broader pattern.

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To understand their work, it is helpful to distinguish between two primary types of persuasive messages. The first are affective appeals, which are designed to influence a person’s feelings and emotions. An advertisement using smiling faces or uplifting words like “optimism” would be considered an affective appeal.

The second are cognitive appeals, which aim to influence a recipient’s thoughts and beliefs. These messages often present facts, product features, or logical arguments. An ad that lists the benefits of a product or uses a scientific diagram to explain how it works is using a cognitive appeal. The researchers focused specifically on these two types, excluding more complex messages like stories or metaphors that might engage both emotion and logic at once.

Before beginning their analysis, the research team considered several possibilities. One idea, which they called the cognitive superiority hypothesis, suggests that fact-based appeals might generally be more persuasive. Another possibility, the affective superiority hypothesis, posits that emotional messages could have an edge, perhaps because they are easier for people to process. A third option is that both types of appeals are equally effective on average.

The Cultural Dimension

The team’s primary interest, however, was how culture might influence this dynamic. They focused on one of the most established dimensions of cultural difference: individualism versus collectivism. Societies that are more individualistic, such as those in North America and the United Kingdom, tend to emphasize personal independence and uniqueness. In contrast, societies that are more collectivistic, like Japan and China, tend to value social harmony and an individual’s role within a group.

These cultural differences, the researchers reasoned, might lead to different levels of openness to affective or cognitive messages. In collectivistic societies, where attention is often directed toward social context and relationships, emotions are sometimes seen as shared experiences. This could make people in these cultures more receptive to messages that convey feelings.

In individualistic societies, the focus is often on the self and on rule-based reasoning. This orientation could make people more attuned to messages that present logical arguments or highlight the attributes of a product. With this framework, the team set out to see what the collected evidence from decades of research would reveal.

A Global Search for an Answer

The researchers conducted a meta-analysis, a method that involves statistically combining the results of many previous independent studies. This approach allows for the identification of patterns that might not be visible in a single experiment. Their process began with a wide-ranging search of academic databases, looking for studies that directly compared the effectiveness of affective and cognitive appeals.

Their search cast a wide net, using various keywords for persuasion, such as “messages” and “advertisements,” and for appeal types, like “emotional” and “informational.” They also searched for dissertations to include research that might not have been formally published, a step taken to reduce potential publication bias, which is the tendency for studies with significant results to be published more often than those with non-significant findings.

After screening thousands of records, the team applied a set of specific inclusion criteria. A study had to be an experiment where some participants received an affective appeal while others received a cognitive one. It also needed to report the necessary statistics to calculate an effect size, which is a standardized measure of the outcome. After this rigorous filtering, their final dataset included 90 reports containing 133 separate samples from 22 different countries, representing a total of 29,338 participants.

For each study, the researchers extracted key information, including the country where it was conducted and the outcomes measured, which included attitudes, intentions to act, and actual behaviors. They calculated a standardized score for each sample that indicated whether the affective or cognitive appeal was more persuasive. A positive score meant the affective appeal was more effective, while a negative score indicated the cognitive appeal had the advantage.

What the Data Revealed

With this data assembled, the team began their analysis. First, they looked at the overall average across all 133 samples. This initial step revealed a small but consistent pattern: on average, affective appeals led to slightly more message-congruent outcomes than cognitive appeals. This finding provided some support for the idea of affective superiority.

The central part of their investigation came next. The researchers introduced each country’s individualism score into their model. They used a well-established index from the work of Geert Hofstede, which rates countries on a scale from 0 to 100 for individualism. This allowed them to see if the effectiveness of emotional versus logical appeals changed as a society’s level of individualism changed.

The analysis showed that a society’s position on the individualism-collectivism spectrum did, in fact, correspond to a different pattern of results. In societies that were relatively collectivistic, affective appeals were more persuasive than cognitive appeals. The advantage for emotional messages was clear in these cultural contexts.

However, for societies that were relatively individualistic, the picture was different. In these cultures, affective and cognitive appeals were found to be similarly effective. Neither type of message held a consistent advantage over the other. This finding suggests that in individualistic contexts, the two persuasive strategies may work equally well on a broad population level.

The researchers also checked for other potential influences. They examined whether the proportion of female participants in a study’s sample changed the results, but it did not. They also looked at the publication year of the studies to see if the effects had changed over time, perhaps due to globalization, but found no such trend.

Insights for a Global Marketplace

The study’s findings come with certain boundaries. The researchers note that a large portion of the included studies were conducted in the United States and other English-speaking, individualistic nations. The body of available research from collectivistic cultures, particularly from regions like Africa, was smaller. They also point out that their analysis shows a relationship between cultural values and persuasion, but as a meta-analysis, it does not establish a direct causal link.

For businesses and organizations operating in a global marketplace, this research offers some practical considerations. The findings suggest that in markets with more collectivistic cultures, advertising and communication campaigns that lean into emotion may have a greater impact. In more individualistic markets, where both appeal types appear equally effective, the choice might depend more on the specific product, audience segment, or campaign goal.

This work also opens up new lines of inquiry for communication scholars. The results raise questions about the underlying mental processes at play. Future studies could explore why people in collectivistic cultures seem more receptive to affective appeals. It also suggests that researchers could examine other cultural dimensions or more specific types of emotional and logical messages to gain a more detailed understanding of persuasion across the world.