Affective-cognitive Matching in Persuasion: Similarities and Differences Among Three Intrapsychic Perspectives

Persuasive communications can match or mismatch characteristics of message recipients in many ways. As this volume highlights, a product advertisement, for example, could promotes a new laptop emphasizing its iconic style (i.e., social image) or its excellent functionalities (i.e., quality). It can also emphasize its capability to increase the personal productivity (i.e., individualism) or its degree of facilitating joint tasks with colleagues (i.e., collectivism). One important matching effect relates to a classic distinction in persuasive communication research between appeals that are predominantly affective, cognitive, or a mix of the two (Breckler, 1984; Knepprath & Clevenger, 1965; Ruechelle, 1958). By the term “affective”, we refer to the feelings or emotions associated with an attitude object. For instance, organizations and public institutions seeking to elicit support for reducing CO2 emissions might appeal to the recipients’ emotions through a fear-inducing reminder of the dangers of climate change for children (Wolf et al., 2023). By the term “cognitive,” we refer to the beliefs associated with an attitude object. For instance, a message might provide evidence-focused arguments for reducing CO2 emissions, such as the health benefits of walking rather than driving (e.g., Nilsson et al., 2016). Scholars and practitioners of persuasion in marketing and advertising have long been curious about whether affective or cognitive messages are more persuasive and whether there are factors that enhance the persuasive power of one or the other type of message (e.g., Fabrigar & Petty, 1999; Haddock et al., 2008, see Teeny et al., 2021, for a review).

In this regard, experiments have found that the persuasive effectiveness of a more affective or more cognitive message in part depends on the audience’s propensity to process primarily affective or cognitive information. That is, when the affective/cognitive content of the message matches the recipients’ propensity toward processing affective or cognitive information, the persuasive effect of the message is greater (i.e., affect-cognition matching effect), providing that the persuasive content itself is strong or cogent (Petty & Wegener, 1998). These recipient characteristics have been studied from three different intrapsychic perspectives, however. Taking attitude towards exercise as an example, people may base their attitude primarily on the emotions or cognitions that they experience when they think about their attitude (an attitude’s structural basis; Crites et al., 1994) or they can simply believe that their attitude towards exercise is primarily based on emotion or cognition (an attitude’s meta-basis; See et al., 2008). In other cases, people may have a general motivation to approach emotional or cognitive stimuli (a motivational basis; Maio & Esses, 2001). In this chapter, we will briefly review the extent to which matching effects are produced for each of these three intrapsychic perspectives. We will also explore the process underlying matching effects and how the integration of different variables may help yield a more complete understanding of affect-cognition matching.