Too Close for Comfort: Resisting Relevance as a Lever for Persuasion

Abstract

Objective: This work investigates how broad principles of persuasion (e.g., the role of relevance) operate in the context of social identities. Although relevance is expected to facilitate persuasion, we use information targeting as a relevance intervention to test whether and why signaling relevance through identities (e.g., race) backfires. Methods: In Study 1, medical practitioners were surveyed about their evaluations and use of information targeting. In Studies 2-5, European Americans and African Americans were told they received information about HIV and/or flu after providing their demographics (targeting condition) or due to chance (control condition). Collectively, these studies tested the direct consequences of increasing relevance via targeting identities (Study 2), the mechanism underlying these consequences (Studies 3-4), whether consequences emerge only when identities are used as a relevance cue (Studies 3-4), and whether perceptions about the source of relevance produces divergent consequences (Study 5). Results: Practitioners reported favorable evaluations and use of targeting (Study 1). In Studies 2-5, being in the targeting (versus control) condition generally decreased attention to the information and produced more negative source evaluations for African Americans, but not European Americans. Studies 3-4 showed that consequences emerged due to perceptions of being unfairly judged, and only emerged when racial identities were used as a relevance cue. Study 5 revealed that targeting backfires when recipients perceive that relevance is derived from the research team. Conclusions: Leveraging relevance through social identities can preclude the expected benefits of relevance by increasing perceptions of judgment and/or beliefs that relevance is being externally imposed.