An Introduction to Personalized Persuasion

This chapter provides an introduction and overview on the concept of personalized persuasion, an essential strategy in the behavioral sciences for influencing attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Personalized persuasion, in brief, describes the alignment or “match” between a variable in the message recipient (e.g., their gender, political views, etc.) and a variable in the content, source, or context of the message, enhancing the appeal’s effectiveness. This chapter thus provides a foundational understanding of personalized persuasion and serves as a preface and outline for the subsequent chapters on this topic in The Handbook on Personalized Persuasion: Theory and Application. In summary, this chapter offers a cross-discipline definition of personalized persuasion, describes key concepts in the study and theorizing on this persuasive approach, and presents a brief, historical narrative on its origin in social psychological research.