Designing persuasive health materials using processing fluency: a literature review

Abstract

BackgroundHealth materials to promote health behaviors should be readable and generate favorable evaluations of the message. Processing fluency (the subjective experience of ease with which people process information) has been increasingly studied over the past decade. In this review, we explore effects and instantiations of processing fluency and discuss the implications for designing effective health materials. We searched seven online databases using “processing fluency” as the key word. In addition, we gathered relevant publications using reference snowballing. We included published records that were written in English and applicable to the design of health materials.ResultsWe found 40 articles that were appropriate for inclusion. Various instantiations of fluency have a uniform effect on human judgment: fluently processed stimuli generate positive judgments (e.g., liking, confidence). Processing fluency is used to predict the effort needed for a given task; accordingly, it has an impact on willingness to undertake the task. Physical perceptual, lexical, syntactic, phonological, retrieval, and imagery fluency were found to be particularly relevant to the design of health materials.ConclusionsHealth-care professionals should consider the use of a perceptually fluent design, plain language, numeracy with an appropriate degree of precision, a limited number of key points, and concrete descriptions that make recipients imagine healthy behavior. Such fluently processed materials that are easy to read and understand have enhanced perspicuity and persuasiveness.

A qualitative analysis of the beliefs of Japanese anti-influenza vaccination website authors

“…Regarding the manner of writing online pro-vaccine information, studies indicate that anti-vaccine websites are easier to read than pro-vaccine websites [ 37 , 38 , 39 ]. According to psychological research on processing fluency, audiences tend to more readily accept suggestions and are more willing to undertake a suggested action when reading easy-to-read text than text that is difficult to read [ 40 , 41 , 42 ]. Therefore, the ease of readability of online anti-vaccination messages may contribute to readers' acceptance of the anti-vaccination position [ 38 , 39 ].…”

Dual-process theories to counter the anti-vaccination movement

“…Additionally, System 1 responds to stimuli possessing cognitive ease such as perceptual, linguistic, and imagery ease ( Kahneman, 2011 ). Therefore, if vaccine recommendation messages use fonts and type sizes that make materials easy to read for perceptual ease, plain language (i.e., common and familiar words, short sentences, explicit sentence constructions) for linguistic ease, and pictures for imagery ease, such pro-vaccination messages may be able to activate System 1 ( Okuhara et al, 2017 ). Studies have shown that a message with high cognitive ease significantly increased self-efficacy ( Okuhara et al, 2020 ), behavioral intention ( Song and Schwarz, 2008 ), and actual behavior ( Okuhara et al, 2018d ) in comparison with a message with low cognitive ease.…”

Effect of regulatory focus primed by a smartphone application on calling plan satisfaction

“…This indicates that perceptual fluency (rather than conceptual fluency) can change according to a type of smartphone application with a different information presentation format. Many extant studies have shown that perceptual fluency influences consumer behaviours (Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009;Okuhara et al, 2017). Perceptual fluency plays an important role in moderating consumers' response to an externally-presented stimulus (Park et al, 2017).…”

“…Meanwhile, according to the processing fluency theory (Brakus et al, 2014;Okuhara et al, 2017), perceptual fluency (defined as the ease of perceiving physical features) with a smartphone application may amplify the moderating effect of regulatory focus on the relationship between phone usage and calling plan satisfaction. Specifically, when perceptual fluency is high (vs. low), consumers with a prevention (promotion) focus would have higher satisfaction with a calling plan in case of usage below (above) a preset free allowance.…”