Comic-style nudges for behavioral change

Abstract

The major objective of this study is to examine the persuasive effect of comic-form messages compared to plain text messages on social network. We evaluated and compared several different comic parameters to understand the comic elements that can make a comic message more persuasive. With all kinds of information in different forms around us, making a message attractive and persuasive is becoming more and more challenging. As a result, in this study, we decided to examine the effect of comic messages in persuading readers to adopt behavioral change. The thesis first introduces a method to transfer traditional text posts on social network to comic-style posts. In the second stage, we design the experiment to examine the persuasive effect of comic posts compared to plain text posts. Finally, we extend our study to compare the effects of different comic elements in persuading, such as shading, background color, and character gestures. We conducted a survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk to evaluate our findings. The results from our experiment show that comic-style messages when compared to plain text messages can better persuade readers to adopt behavioral change. We also proofed that different comic elements can contribute differently in persuading people. The results from our study provide fundamental basis for future study on comic and graphic persuasion. The thesis hopes to provide insights to comic generating and application in communication, thus making a contribution to improve how people communicate ideas on social network.