A norm commonly appearing in theories based on the behavior among persuasion theories, for example, Theory of Reasoned Action(TRA), Theory of Planned Behavior(TPB), Theory of Normative Social Behavior (TNSB) is a very important concept that affects a ...
A norm commonly appearing in theories based on the behavior among persuasion theories, for example, Theory of Reasoned Action(TRA), Theory of Planned Behavior(TPB), Theory of Normative Social Behavior (TNSB) is a very important concept that affects an individual's behavior. These theories argue that the behavior of an individual can be changed by changing norms and this becomes the theoretical frame of the normative message strategy.
This study is to examine how the persuasive effect of a message varies when using the normative approach as a message strategy in persuasive communication such as advertising, public relations and adopt an product type of advertising campaign and self-monitoring, an individual psychological characteristic as factors (moderating variables) that may affect these persuasive effects to verify how much these factors affect the persuasive effects.
Theory of Normative Social Behavior (TNSB) describes the mechanism of the effects of descriptive norm pointing to the individual's perception about a specific behavior of other people. However, the persuasive effect of a normative message may vary depending on the psychological traits of the audience. Self-monitoring can be considered as one of psychological variables of audience highly related to norms, an important factor of persuasion and self-monitoring refers to the degree that an individual's behavior is affected by the social situation. That is, those with high self-monitoring are more influenced by social situations and this means that their behavior can be determined by norms. Therefore, it would be meaningful to examine the persuasive effect of normative messages based on self-monitoring.
Self-monitoring is a tendency that individuals facing any situation identify clues on which behavior is suitable for the situation and modify their behavior accordingly and those with high self-monitoring are sensitive to clues pointing to the socially appropriate behavior so modify self-presentation by using these clues. In contrast, those with low self-monitoring are relatively less sensitive to social clues and tend to maintain consistent self-presentation regardless of the situation. They choose and regulate their behavior mainly based on their own internal standards and attitudes.
By affecting individual descriptive norms, normative messages are expected to show better persuasive effects than other messages. In addition, people with higher self-monitoring representing the sensitivity to the norms are expected to show greater persuasive effects of the normative message. Also, people with low self-monitoring show highly consistent behavior compared to those with high self-monitoring because they are less sensitive to the surrounding circumstances and regulate their behavior mainly based on their own internal standards and attitudes. Therefore, people with low self-monitoring are expected not to show relatively large difference of persuasion effects between normative messages and non-normative messages. According to the previous studies, social identity products(SIP) performing the function of expressing themselves a lot to other people as well as utilitarian function are expected to have a larger impact on the persuasion effect of normative messages than utilitarian products (UP) performing utilitarian function among product advertisements in the high self-monitoring group. In addition, we want to make a reference by including advertisements of the health communication, one of the areas that a normative message strategy has been often used and comparing them with product advertising.
Thus, the hypotheses are presented as follows:
H1> Normative messages will have a more positive impact on attitudes and norms of audience (compared to Non-normative message)
H2> The effects of normative messages will appear more strongly when self-monitoring is high (compared to low)
H3> The effects of normative messages will appear more strongly in social imageproduct campaign (compared to functional product campaign when self-monitoring is high.
The research is conducted as an experimental study. Total samples are to be compared by group (12 groups of normative message (normative vs non-normative) X self-monitoring (high vs low) X product type of advertising campaign (UP·SIP·Health). For the verification of the H1, two groups are to be compared between normative approach and non-normatve approach and for the verification of H2, normative approach X self-monitoring (high vs low) is to be compared and for the verification of the H3, the comparison of normative approach X self-monitoring X product type is to be conducted. The experiment is carried out on-line.