The potential of generative AI for personalized persuasion at scale

By S. C. Matz, J. Teeny, S. Vaid, H. Peters, G. Harari, M. Cerf. Scientific Reports, 2024

324 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Matching the language or content of a message to the psychological profile of its recipient (known as “personalized persuasion”) is widely considered to be one of the most effective messaging strategies. We demonstrate that the rapid advances in large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, could accelerate this influence by making personalized persuasion scalable. Across four studies (consisting of seven sub-studies; total N = 1788), we show that personalized messages crafted by ChatGPT exhibit significantly more influence than non-personalized messages. This was true across different domains of persuasion (e.g., marketing of consumer products, political appeals for climate action), psychological profiles (e.g., personality traits, political ideology, moral foundations), and when only providing the LLM with a single, short prompt naming or describing the targeted psychological dimension. Thus, our findings are among the first to demonstrate the potential for LLMs to automate, and thereby scale, the use of personalized persuasion in ways that enhance its effectiveness and efficiency. We discuss the implications for researchers, practitioners, and the general public.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c2fc6f6e9f22e109144e1dd01097b20fc86d530

Citations in the corpus

• Generative AI (2023, unknown): “…generative AI can automate the creation of personalized marketing content, for instance, different sales slogans for introverts vs. extroverts (Matz et al. 2017) or other personality traits as personalized marketing content is more effective than a one-content-fits-all approach (Matz et al. 2023).”
• Generative AI enhances individual creativity but reduces the collective diversity of novel content (2023, unknown): “That a tightly controlled prompt requesting a generative AI idea shows sizable effects on creativity in our study provides a promising starting point for future researchers to delve deeper into customization and personalization of generative AI for different writers ( 8 ).”