Wat leert onderzoek over overtuigende teksten over het ontwerpen van overtuigender teksten? Een overzicht van meta-analytische studies

Persuasive communication is designed to elicit certain thoughts and feelings in order to change the audience’s attitudes and intentions, with the ultimate goal of influencing behavior. This paper addresses the question what meta-analyses in the field of persuasion can tell us about the effects that persuasive communication can have on the audience’s behavior and on the steps leading up to that behavior. A review of these meta-analyses shows that changing intentions does not automatically lead to similar sized behavioral effects, that communicative interventions only have small to medium effects, that these effects can be obtained through ethos, pathos, and logos, and that these effects are to some extent susceptible to message design characteristics. The (small to medium) size of the effects of communicative interventions has implications for the design of research on persuasive communication as well as for the advice for practitioners.