Compliance with Mass Marketing Solicitation: The Roles of Verbatim and Gist Processing

AbstractIntroduction: Mass marketing scams threaten financial and personal well-being. Grounded in fuzzy-trace theory, we examined whether verbatim and gist-based risk processing predicts susceptibility to scams and whether such processing can be altered.Methods: Online, 701 participants read a solicitation letter and indicated willingness to call an “activation number” to claim an alleged $500,000 sweepstakes prize. Participants focused on the solicitation’s verbatim details (hypothesized to increase risk-taking) or its broad gist (hypothesized to decrease risk-taking).Results: As expected, measures of verbatim-based processing positively predicted contact intentions, whereas measures of gist-based processing negatively predicted contact intentions.Contrary to hypotheses, experimental condition did not influence intentions (43% across conditions). Contact intentions were associated with perceptions of low risk, high benefit, and the offer’s apparent genuineness, as well as self-reported decision regret, subjective vulnerability to scams, and prior experience falling for scams.Conclusions: Overall, message perceptions and prior susceptibility, rather than experimental manipulations, mattered in predicting scam susceptibility