The Foreign-Language Effect in Social Marketing.

International charity organizations reach out to people around the world with calls for helping those in need. Given the key role of private donations, understanding what makes charity appeals more or less effective in promoting helping behavior is crucial. Since charity communication often transcends national and linguistic borders, aiming to persuade both native and foreign language speakers, a vital question for non-profit organizations is how the use of a foreign language influences communication effectiveness in multilingual societies. Past research in linguistics and psychology shows that using a foreign language systematically influences information-processing, decision-making, and choice. Such foreign-language effects (FLE) demonstrate, for instance, that processing information in a foreign language reduces a number of decision biases (e.g., loss aversion, Hot Hand fallacy), induces lower risk and higher benefit perceptions, promotes utilitarian moral reasoning, and leads to more lenient judgments of transgressions of moral and social norms. Although a number of mechanisms have been proposed to underlie the FLE, the leading explanation for most findings pertains to reduced emotional resonance and reduced imagery in the foreign language. Surprisingly, almost no research exists on the implications of FLE for persuasive communication. Therefore, extending past work to the novel domain of non-profit marketing, we propose three experimental studies. Study 1 tests the impact of positively-framed and negatively-framed charity appeals presented in the native vs. foreign language. Study 2a and Study 2b go further to test whether language moderates two well-established phenomena in helping behavior – the identified victim effect and the identified intervention effect. Critically, in addition to the key outcomes – donation intention and donation amount – the proposed studies will also measure a number of mediating variables (positive and negative affect, sympathy for the victims, mental imagery vividness, perceived impact of the donation/intervention) in order to disentangle competing predictions and gain more insight into the processes driving FLE. In sum, the proposed research will advance our understanding of the factors that increase the effectiveness of charity appeals and of how using a foreign vs. native language affects perception, judgment and behavior. Importantly, our results will be relevant to practitioners, as they could help them design more effective social marketing campaigns, eventually contributing to human welfare.

Keywords:COMMUNICATION, MARKETING, ADVERTISING, LANGUAGE USE

Disciplines:Motivation and emotion, Social behaviour and social action, Social perception and cognition, Advertising, Marketing communications