Dual Process Intuitions: Consumers’ Beliefs about Persuasion Processing Drive Morality of Marketing Communications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Consumers tend to dislike companies that use immoral marketing persuasion tactics. How do consumers decide what persuasion is morally acceptable and what persuasion is not? Three studies show that morality of marketing persuasion depends on consumers’ beliefs about information processing—Dual Process Intuitions. If consumers think persuasion aims at emotions and intuition—bypassing deliberative reasoning—they will evaluate it as more immoral and manipulative than persuasion believed to be processed deliberately. This is because consumers find system 1 processing (fast and effortless; e.g., encountering fear appeal ad) more automatic than system 2 processing (slow and effortful; e.g., reading about a product). Since system 2 (rather than system 1) persuasion is considered less immoral, it yields greater positive attitude change than that of system 1. These findings contribute to the literature on lay theories about persuasion, beliefs about information processing, and morality in marketing. Practitioners may use these results to better tailor their persuasion messages, especially if their customers are usually sensitive to persuasion—by creating the perception of autonomous choice using system 2 persuasion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.037 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".