Gender Moderates Persuasion Effects of Negative Health Messages

Abstract

The literature on health messages has paid considerable attention to cognitive determinants of successful message framing, but a recent meta-analysis showed that positive and negative emotions, too, exert influence. We surmised that the contradictions in the literature could have owed to a failure to control the composition of the study samples. Women typically show greater Neuroticism scores than men and greater susceptibility to negative emotions not only in life settings but also according to neuroimaging. Therefore, samples with mixed genders may distort research outcomes when negatively framed health messages are presented to experimental subjects. We investigated whether the adherence by women to a nutritional recommendation is stronger in the face of negative than positive visual frames and whether men behave differently. A factorial experiment was employed, with the photo of a coffin versus one of a smiling family included along texts on COVID-19 in posters virtually shown to hospital personnel and university students in Lima, Peru individually. Whereas all the results were non-significant in the global sample, negative visual framing increased intention to adhere to the nutritional recommendation among women but not among men. Researchers are advised to take into account gender differences to avoid arriving at false conclusions.