Instrumental Goal Activation Increases Online Petition Support Across Languages

Abstract

Research on processing fluency and instrumental goal activation suggests people often perceive complex information positively when effort in a task is valued. The current paper evaluates this idea in five online petition samples (total N = 1,047,655 petitions), assessing how the complexity of a written petition associates with support. Consistent with prior work, petitions with more complex content associated with more signatures and an increased probability of petitions making concrete change than those with simple content. Exploratory results suggest other forms of verbal complexity associate with petition support as well: petitions written by more complex thinkers and those that contain a more complex structure (e.g., less readable writing) also received more signatures. Crucially, these patterns are cross-cultural, as the results are consistent across 8 languages and over 12 countries. Various types of verbal complexity are therefore instrumental to get people to support online causes.