Increasingly, social marketers are using sexual information in public service announcements and collateral material for a wide range ofcauses. This study builds on previous research to explain how sexual appeals can affect cognitive processing and persuasion for "help-self' social marketing topics. It also goes beyond traditional single-message research designs by testing matched pairs of appeals (sexual/nonsexual) for 13 social marketing topics. The major finding was that sexual appeals were more persuasive overall than matched nonsexual appeals for social marketing topics. Sexual appeals also stimulated more favorable ad executionrelated thoughts but had a negative effect on cognitive elaboration (e.g., support and counterarguments). Respondents also reported that sexual appeals were more attention getting, likeable, dynamic, and somewhat more apt to increase their interest in the topic than were nonsexual appeals. These findings suggest that persuasion is largely the result ofperipheral processing and distraction from somewhat unpleasant messages when receivers are expected to counterargue the message or be resistant to change.

Current research practices in communication create problems for both internal and external validity. One serious design flaw, which involves use of a single message to represent a category of messages, occurs in nearly all of the experimental research on communication effects. The problem with such a design is that an observed difference between categories may reflect only differences between individual, idiosyncratic cases. A related error, the “language‐as‐fixed‐effect fallacy,” involves use of several replications of each category, but analysis of the cases as fixed effects. The consequence is that findings cannot be generalized beyond the sample used. Future research should use multiple cases within each message category studied and treat cases as nested random effects. Since the cases cannot be true random samples from message populations, care must be taken to avoid known sources of bias or other barriers to generalization.

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