What Makes a Message Persuasive? Identifying Adaptations Towards Persuasiveness in Nine Exploratory Case Studies
This addresses the challenge of crafting persuasive messages for writers and communicators, though it is incremental as it builds on existing NLG and persuasion research.
The study investigated how professional and non-professional writers adapt messages to increase persuasiveness in written scenarios, finding that humans, especially professionals, can achieve high persuasiveness, and AI can enhance speed and alignment in the process.
The ability to persuade others is critical to professional and personal success. However, crafting persuasive messages is demanding and poses various challenges. We conducted nine exploratory case studies to identify adaptations that professional and non-professional writers make in written scenarios to increase their subjective persuasiveness. Furthermore, we identified challenges that those writers faced and identified strategies to resolve them with persuasive natural language generation, i.e., artificial intelligence. Our findings show that humans can achieve high degrees of persuasiveness (more so for professional-level writers), and artificial intelligence can complement them to achieve increased celerity and alignment in the process.