The Handbook of Personalized Persuasion: Theory and Application

The Handbook of Personalized Persuasion provides the most comprehensive and state-of-the-art review of the expansive literature on personalized messaging in persuasion.

The book describes what features of people, messages, and contexts are most effective for personally tailored communication, and how this knowledge can be leveraged to improve the influence of messaging in any domain. It also addresses when such personalization can be counterproductive or backfire. Bringing together some of the foremost experts in the area, the book consists of a diverse, global, and interdisciplinary set of scholars who tackle the theory and application of personalized persuasion. Organized into two sections, the first part of this book addresses the many aspects of people to which messages can be targeted, such as the basis of a person’s attitude or the person’s goals or identity. The second part of this book tackles the many important areas of application in which personalized messaging has been examined, such as political and health messaging, consumer advertising, and even online misinformation.

This handbook is essential reading for researchers and students in social psychology and across the behavioral and social sciences, while also offering practitioners in marketing, government, and beyond the most cutting-edge insights into how to maximize the influence of personalized persuasion.

Richard E. Petty, PhD., is a Distinguished University Professor of psychology at The Ohio State University. Petty’s research focuses broadly on the situational and individual difference factors responsible for changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Much of his current work examines the implications of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion for understanding prejudice, consumer choices, political and legal decisions, and health behaviors.

Andrew Luttrell, PhD., is an Associate Professor of psychological science at Ball State University. His research centers on people’s opinions, including when and how those opinions change. In particular, he is interested in what happens when people moralize their opinions and how moral persuasive rhetoric can sometimes be compelling and sometimes backfire.

Jacob D. Teeny, PhD., is an Assistant Professor of marketing at Northwestern University, specializing in the psychology of social influence. Specifically, he researches the factors that lead people to try to persuade others, the elements in a message or advertisement that make it more persuasive, and how the norms underlying society influence people’s everyday opinions.