Project 3: Effective Persuasion

URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/S_P3EP

Course Objective

Upon completion of this course, the student is able to ...
• Critically reflect on the effectiveness of persuasive messages;
• Describe concepts relevant for experimental research;
• Apply good and responsible research practices;
• Design, program and conduct an experimental study;
• Collect, analyze and interpret quantitative experimental data;
• Write a short academic journal article based on experimental data;
• Present experimental results to a scientific audience.

Course Content

Organizations often use messages to influence people’s minds or promote certain behaviors. For instance, marketers try to make consumers feel good about their brand so they will buy the brand, politicians try to convince the public to support policy measures, game designers want to entertain players so they continue playing, and public health organizations may want to promote exercise behavior. Persuasive messages can come in many shapes and forms, such as digital ads on social media, speeches, video trailers, or leaflets. Sometimes the content of these messages is relatively complex (e.g., a flyer presenting many arguments), while at other times the content is relatively simple (e.g., one visual, slogan or a simple nudge ). Usually several ideas are put forward when designing a message, but what idea will work best? Testing your idea helps to determine if your message will be effective in changing people’s mind or behavior. While in business this is often referred to as a/b-testing, scientists call this an experiment. Mastering the knowledge and skills to conduct a good experiment is essential for communication professionals. In this project, you will work in teams on designing and conducting an experiment to test the effectiveness of a message. Using information and theories from the parallel courses, you will then develop your own research idea (what would you like to change; what should your message target; what should your message content contain and look like?) and turn this into a testable question. You will experimentally test the effectiveness of your message and learn to correctly report the results.

Teaching Methods

Two plenary lectures. Weekly workgroup meetings.

Method of Assessment

Individual and group assignments.

Literature

from parallel courses in semester one is used. In addition, students will search for literature themselves that is needed to answer their research question.

Target Audience

Second year bachelor Communication Science.

Custom Course Registration

In this course, you cannot enroll for one of the study groups yourself, but you will be assigned by the course coordinator. The allocation will be announced via Canvas. Please note: You do have to register for the course and the other course components on VU.nl.