Studies have demonstrated frequent use of English in international advertising, but little is known about people's preference for English versus local languages. This article empirically investigated the difficulty of the English language as a possible determinant of people's preference for English or the local language. In an experiment, Dutch participants judged a number of car ads with English slogans that were pretested as easy or difficult to understand. They were subsequently asked to express a preference for either the English slogan or the Dutch equivalent. Results showed that easy-to-understand English slogans were appreciated better than difficult-to-understand English slogans. Moreover, the degree of difficulty in comprehension of the English slogans affected participants' preference for English. English was preferred to Dutch when it was easy to understand; when it was difficult to understand, English was appreciated as much as the Dutch equivalent. In conclusion, the experiment provides empirical support for the role of comprehension in the preference for and appreciation of English in international advertising.

Cultural differences in reasoning and persuasion have mainly been documented for the East*West divide. Nisbett (2003) expects such differences to be absent for Western cultures because of their shared Grecian inheritance. The results of two experiments, however, show that France and The Netherlands, both Western European countries, differ with respect to the persuasiveness of different evidence types. In Study 1 (N0600), cultural differences occurred between the relative persuasiveness of anecdotal, statistical, causal, and expert evidence. In Study 2 (N0600), the quality of statistical and expert evidence was manipulated. For the Dutch, but not for the French, normatively strong evidence was more persuasive than normatively weak evidence for both evidence types. Implications and possible explanations are discussed.Keywords: Argument Quality; Evidence; France; Persuasion; The NetherlandsIn current theories on persuasion, it is believed that under certain conditions the quality of the arguments in a persuasive message determines the outcome of the persuasion process (Chaiken,

It is a truism that successful persuasive messages should be adapted to audi ence values. A substantial research literature-not previously systematically reviewed-has examined whether advertisements with appeals adapted to the audience's important cultural values (e.g., individualism for North Americans) are more persuasive and better liked than appeals that are unadapted to such values. A meta-analytic review of that research finds that adapted ads are only slightly more persuasive (mean r = .073, 67 cases) and slightly better liked (mean r = .082, 66 cases) than unadapted ads. Moreover, these effects were mainly limited to North Americans and Asians and to values related to individualism-collectivism. In this chapter, we discuss explanations for these results and identify directions for future research.

Whereas there are many publications in which argumentation quality has been defined by argumentation theorists, considerably less research attention has been paid to lay people's considerations regarding argument quality. Considerations about strong and weak argumentation are relevant because they can be compared with actual persuasive success. Argumentation theorists' conceptions have to some extent been shown to be compatible with actual effectiveness, but for lay people such compatibility has yet to be determined. This study experimentally investigated lay people's expectations about the persuasiveness of anecdotal, statistical, causal, and expert evidence, and compared these expectations with the actual persuasiveness of these evidence types. Dutch and French participants (N = 174) ranked four types of evidence in terms of their expected persuasiveness for eight different claims. Both cultural groups expected statistical evidence to be the most persuasive type of evidence to other people, followed by expert, causal, and, finally, anecdotal evidence. A comparison of these rankings with the results of Hornikx and Hoeken (Communication Monographs 74, 443-463, 2007, Study 1) on the actual persuasiveness of the same evidence types reveals that people's expectations are generally accurate: How relatively persuasive they expect evidence types to be often corresponded with their actual persuasiveness.

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