The impact of argument strength in health communication

Abstract

Argument strength plays an important role in the formation of stable attitudes that are predictive of related behavior. Fortunately, arguments that meet normative criteria for argument strength are in actuality more convincing than arguments that meet such criteria to a lesser degree. However, these differences in persuasiveness are relatively small, and will only occur if the audience is paying attention to the arguments. And even then, the role of argument strength may be limited. Health communication often focuses on behavior related to food and exercise, which are strongly intertwined with emotionally loaded issues such as pleasure and beauty, and relate to culturally relevant practices. Such issues are prone to elicit a myside bias in the audience. As a result, people may aim to dismantle (strong) arguments that go against their opinions while boosting the (weak) arguments that are accordance with their preferences. Understanding how people can be motivated to unbiasedly evaluate a message’s arguments, will be important to improve health communication’s impact.