When Increasing the Strength of the Argument Becomes Counterproductive: The Role of Argumentative Markers in the Arousal of the Psychological Reactance

Abstract

The rationale of this study is that by stressing the argumentative force of the message, and thus orientating its processing, scalar adverbs are likely to be processed as an attempt to influence the decision making as regards the message advocacy and consequently trigger some aversive reactions in the recipients. To support this claim, an experiment is conducted in a context of a (campus) health promotion program dealing with HIV infection. It shows that the introduction of such adverbs in an epidemiological information report increases the cognitive and affective outcomes dealing with psychological reactance, and decreases the message acceptability and the behavioral intentions. It also shows that for the affective component of psychological reactance and message acceptability, these effects occur especially when the source of the message is perceived as authoritative. The persuasiveness of such linguistic items in the context of health communication is addressed in the conclusion of the study.