Design for Emotional Appeal
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Explain emotional appeal.
- Apply emotional appeal to behavior change design.
Appeal to Emotion
Our brains are made up of two systems. One is slow and analytical. The other is quick and emotional.
NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a simple analogy to explain the relationship between the two. Think of an elephant and a rider. The rider is the analytical system, planning and analyzing the way forward on a journey of change. The elephant is the emotional system, which provides the power for the journey. The rider can try to move the elephant in a certain direction, but if there is a disagreement, the elephant usually wins.
The challenge is to motivate the elephant to move and move in the right direction. This is achieved with emotional appeals to the emotional system in the mind.
When designing for behavior change, we often make logical appeals to our mind’s analytical system—for example, “You will reduce carbon emissions”—while forgetting to also appeal to the emotional system. The most successful behavior change solutions do both. For example, “You will reduce carbon emissions to reduce the worsening impacts of climate change so your children can have happier, more normal lives.”
Emotional appeals are powerfully and practically effective. In a 2015 research study on energy conservation, researchers tested two approaches to change households' energy saving behavior. First was a rational appeal of monetary savings. Second was an emotional appeal of the harmful effects of energy consumption on people and the environment: pollutants, childhood asthma, and cancer. The emotional appeal outperformed the rational appeal by 9 percent, and for families with children, the difference was 18 percent.
Design for Emotional Appeal
Tap into core emotions that drive specific actions or outcomes.
This is easier said than done. It’s often more evident how to appeal to the logical system of the brain than the emotional system. Four useful tactics for designing with the lever of emotional appeal are:
| Emotional Appeal Design Tactic | Best Practice |
|---|---|
| Empathize with what the audience values emotionally. |
Spend time with the people you are designing for to understand what they emotionally value and what motivates them. Design messaging and your solutions with these values in mind. |
| Authentically associate the emotional value with the logical appeal and the behavior change. |
The most effective solutions associate the emotional and rational appeals with the needed behavior change. But if you try to align them together in a way that doesn’t make sense, you’re likely to create distrust rather than positive behavior change. Ensure that your emotional appeal isn’t emotional simply for the sake of it. Make sure the connection between a behavior change and its benefits are clear. |
| Communicate in emotional terms. |
Imagery, story, and context deliver your appeal to change in an emotional form. Put a human face on communications and focus on a single story instead of abstract statistics. |
| Make the message personally relevant, relatable, and appealing for the specific audience. |
The more tailored the message, the stronger the appeal for behavior change. |
In the next unit, you learn how to incorporate social influences in your design work.