Thanks for writing this up! One minor question: when you say
Marketing scholar Jacob Hornik and colleagues (2016) combined 2,276 different effect sizes from advertising studies in meta-analysis and found a mean weighted effect size on persuasion outcomes (including “attitude toward the product, attitude toward the brand, purchase intention, and product choice”) of r = .19.
I think that’s referencing this from the paper:
The overall reliabilitycorrected and sample-weighted correlations between appeals and response
behavior are .22 and .19 (the uncorrected correlations are .23 and .20) for
Aad and persuasion, respectively (with a 95% confidence interval from
.13 to .27)
I’m kind of confused what we are measuring the correlation between. I think this is the correlation between how much someone says that they like an advertisement and how likely they are to actually purchase the product, right?
It could be that this correlation is very low yet advertising is extremely effective, or vice versa, right?
(This isn’t really an important point, I was just confused why people were using r, and figured other people might have the same confusion.)
Yeah I’m also a little confused about why they’re using r without digging back into it in detail. But if I read it correctly, then their correlation coefficient there somehow pools together pretty weak proxies for behaviour (“attitude toward the product, attitude toward the brand,” potentially also “purchase intention”) with actual behaviour (“product choice”).
I definitely don’t think that we should pay too much attention to the findings of that particular meta-analysis when thinking about how to change attitudes or behaviour in the context of the farmed animal movement or other EA-adjacent cause areas. But it is still weakly relevant evidence and it would have been disingenuous of me not to include it, I think. (My prior was that using humour and sex appeals are both usually pretty bad ideas for serious social movements, especially the latter.)
Thanks for writing this up! One minor question: when you say
I think that’s referencing this from the paper:
I’m kind of confused what we are measuring the correlation between. I think this is the correlation between how much someone says that they like an advertisement and how likely they are to actually purchase the product, right?
It could be that this correlation is very low yet advertising is extremely effective, or vice versa, right?
(This isn’t really an important point, I was just confused why people were using r, and figured other people might have the same confusion.)
Yeah I’m also a little confused about why they’re using r without digging back into it in detail. But if I read it correctly, then their correlation coefficient there somehow pools together pretty weak proxies for behaviour (“attitude toward the product, attitude toward the brand,” potentially also “purchase intention”) with actual behaviour (“product choice”).
I definitely don’t think that we should pay too much attention to the findings of that particular meta-analysis when thinking about how to change attitudes or behaviour in the context of the farmed animal movement or other EA-adjacent cause areas. But it is still weakly relevant evidence and it would have been disingenuous of me not to include it, I think. (My prior was that using humour and sex appeals are both usually pretty bad ideas for serious social movements, especially the latter.)