Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Emotions in Audience Decision Making 317

deceased. Thus each person had a different emotional reaction to the same event because each

valued the deceased differently.

The fact that different audience members have different goals and values appears to explain many

individual differences in consumer behavior and media exposure.^76 For example, a cross-cultural

study fi nds that consumers in France purchase expensive bottles of wine because of their desire

for social interaction, whereas consumers in the United States purchase the same wines in order

to prove themselves to others.^77 Thus, an ad that motivates consumers in Boston is unlikely to be

effective with consumers in Paris. Likewise, because different citizens have different values that

come into play when they decide whether to recycle, recycling campaigns focused on a single value

tend to have only limited success.^78

The Link Between Decision Criteria and Goals and Values

The audience’s decision criteria determine which of their goals and values are implicated when

they make a decision.^79 For instance, when deciding between two cars, the criterion or attribute of

safety may implicate the value of personal survival, whereas the criterion of styling may implicate

the value of personal expression. In addition, there is a direct connection between the goals and

values that product attributes implicate and consumer purchases and preferences.^80 Consumers are

motivated to buy a product to the extent they are able to link the product’s attributes to their own

goals and values.^81

The values consumers link to products are often better predictors of their product preferences

than the products’ attributes.^82 The values consumers link to products correlate not only with their

initial purchase intentions, but also with their product and/or service evaluations and with their

repeat purchases as well.^83

Much like consumers responding to products that implicate their goals and values, subordinates

respond more positively to leaders who endorse their goals and values.^84 Business leaders who

frame messages in terms of their subordinates’ goals and values, as opposed to their own, increase

their employees’ motivation, commitment, and satisfaction.^85

Decision criteria or attributes with implications for the audience’s more highly valued goals trigger

more emotion.^86 Although economic attributes such as price may be highly important to consumers,

economic attributes do not have as much potential to elicit emotion as other attributes such as safety

features.^87 Decision criteria or attributes with implications for the audience’s more highly valued goals

are also higher in “trade-off diffi culty.”^88 For instance, new parents who purchase an automobile may

be very reluctant to accept losses on the attribute of safety for gains on the attribute of fuel effi ciency.

Similarly, voters are rarely willing to trade off a positive evaluation of a candidate on an economic issue

for a negative evaluation of the same candidate on a highly valued ethical issue.^89

Cognitive and Physiological Processes in Emotional Decision Making

Unlike rational decision making, emotional decision making includes physiological as well as cog-

nitive processes. Emotional decision making starts as soon as the audience perceives an emotionally

signifi cant stimulus or recognizes an emotionally signifi cant attribute of a stimulus. Only those

stimuli or attributes of a stimulus that are relevant to the audience’s goals and values can be said

to be emotionally signifi cant. As we have seen, the stimulus itself does not trigger an emotion or

the decisions based on it, instead an emotion is triggered when the stimulus implicates one of the

audience’s goals or values.^90

The model of emotional decision making proposed here and shown in Figure 7.1 builds on this

understanding of emotionally signifi cant stimuli. The model also presents an account of emotions