The Relative Persuasiveness of Different Forms of Arguments-From-Consequences: A Review and Integration

Research on persuasive communication has explored a great many different message variations as possible influences on persuasive effectiveness, including image-oriented versus product-quality-oriented advertisements for consumer products, arguments based on long-term or short-term consequences of the advocated action, promotion-oriented versus prevention-oriented appeals, gain-framed versus loss-framed appeals, individualist-oriented appeals versus collectivist-oriented appeals, strong versus weak arguments, and variations in fear appeals—with these commonly treated as more or less independent areas of work. This essay argues that these and other lines of research are in fact quite closely related, because all examine variations of a single argument form, argument-from-consequences. Correspondingly, their findings fit together neatly to underwrite several broad generalizations about the relative persuasiveness of different varieties of consequence-based arguments.