Overview. In this assignment you will test the impact of one of the principles of persuasion you have learned about this semester by conducting a small experiment in which you create differing versions of an appeal to the same charity, varying one dimension which research suggests should have an important impact on influencing an audiences. Select one of the persuasion techniques you learned about through class readings or discussion. The Cialdini book, Influence: Science and practice,should be your guide. Conduct a small experiment to test whether this technique really influences donors' willingness to contribute to the charity. You can do this either by creating different print advertisements for the charity or by conducting the appeal in person. We will select a charity in class that will receive any donations you receive.

Analysis of existing advertisements. Examine approximately 10 different print, radio and/or TV advertisements for soliciting funds for some cause. What techniques are the advertisers using to influence potential donors? Do different charities use the same technqiues? Be sure to link the techniques you've observed in your ads with the research on influence and attitude changes you are learning about from class and readings. Again, the Cialdini book, Influence: Science and Practice, should be your prime resource. Although we will only go over a portion of the Cialdini book in class, feel free to use principles from anywhere in the book in your analysis

The best way to present your results is through a table, listing techniques on the left and a very brief description of how the advertisement used the technique in the cell. The entries in the table can simply be a blank if the ad doesn't use the technique or a 1 if it did, or you can annotate the cells more elaborately, indicating the extent to which the techniques were used and any interesting observations about how the general principles were applied. (Be sure to include an appendix, which provides a copy of print advertisements and pointers to (URLs) for web-based and TV advertisements.

Testing the impact of a persuasion technique. Select one of the persuasion techniques you identified in the previous analysis. Create multiple (at least two) versions of an appeal. The versions should differ on how they use one of the persuasion technique you learned about this semester and observed in your previous analysis. For example, imagine you were investigating whether similarity is a a way to get to get potential donors to think their money is being used to support people whom they like (Ciandini, Page 150). You might create flyers that either emphasize or deemphasize how similar the beneficaries are to the people viewing the flyer or do canvasing on the street, dressing similarly or dissimilarly to the people who are receiving your pitch. To make the experiment efficient to run and to control for other factors that make a beneficiary attractive, you should show each potential donor multiple flyers and counterbalance the similarity manipulation, so that each similarity manipulation appears equally often with each charity or beneficiary. Some attributes , such as physical attractiveness of a model, should have a similar effect on all donors. For others, such as similarity, you would expect that the same objective attribute of a model will have different effects depending upon who is being addressed (e.g., a canvasser wearing a baseball cap on backwards will have better luck among college students than downtown business people, while a briefcase carrying canvasser will have better luck downtown than on a college campus). To test the effect of similarity, you will need to expose the same ptich to different audiences. Some persuasion tactics are easier to test using flyers (e.g., attractiveness of the models), while others are easier through an in-person appeal (e.g., touching the donor to build a personal relationship).

To test whether your campaign works, you should ask for money. Your main dependent measures will be the percentage of people you approach who contribute and the amount they contribute. However, you may want to include some follow-up questions, to ask your subjects about their attitudes toward the different version of the campaign, using 7-point Likert scales.What you ask will depend very much on the type of persusasion technique you are testing. For example, if you were testing the effects of attractiveness on persuasion, you might ask "How worthy do you think this person is to get money from charitiy X." It is often useful to have different people solicit money and ask about the attitude questions.

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FAQ on the persuasion assignment:

The first question is whether or not we are required to have some sort of paper to go along with this assignment, or simply have one table with appendices for the advertisements.

The paper consists of two sub-assignments. The part in which you try to analyze about 10 existing advertisements can be done simply by creating a table, in which the rows are the advertisements (attached or described in an appendix), the columns are the persuasion techniques, and the cell is a brief description of how the technique is implemented in a particular ad. The goal of this portion of the assignment is to see what the advertising industry actually uses.

When we discuss already existing print ads, do they have to ask specifically for donations, or can they be advocating that people visit a website, such as learning more about AIDS at an AIDS website and practicing safer sex, instead of an ad specifically asking for donatons to AIDS research?

The ads can target donations, going to a web site, practicing safe sex or anything else the advertiser is pitching.

Also, how are we to report the success of our own plea? Do we simply list how much money we have acquired? Or do we need to write down some hypotheses of some sort and look at possible lurking variables? I assume that we should write down what method we are going for and how we will do it, but should this just be 1 paragraph or more, like a few pages?

The second part of the assignment consists your experiment testing whether the persuasion techniques in Cialdini actually work.

This section of the paper should be 4-6 pages long. The goal here is for you to learn how to translate between an abstract principle to its actual implementation in a persuasion technique.

1. Start with a hypothesis section. What persuasion technique are you testing? Why do you think it would work?

2. Describe your methods. What are the experimental conditions that manipulate this persuasion technique? .

3. What are your results? Create a table of means and standard deviations for each experimental condition. Use a t-test, correlation, analysis of variance, regression, chi squared test or other statistical technique to test whether the differences between the means are greater or less than you’d expect by change.

4. Interpret your results. Why did they come out the way they did? Did anything unexpected happen when doing your pitches?

5. Include an appendix, an excel spreadsheet or other table that provides your raw data.

Finally, is there some minimum number of people we are supposed to ask for our charity appeal?

In my experience, you’ll need to have between 10-20 respondents per experimental condition to see differences between them. (The size of the experiment is one reason you may want to do this assignment in groups of 2 or 3)

Which foundation will the money be donated to? This is important to work into the advertisement/pitch that I use.

We can choose the charity in class on Tues. If you want to start sooner, I propose you ask for money to the Red Cross, for Katrina Relief. But you can pick any charity that you want, as long as you give the money to the charity.