Strengthening personalized matching by targeting persuasive messages to strong traits of the recipient

Personalized matching is important because matching some aspect of a persuasive message to the recipient can affect the degree of attitude change. In the present review, we discuss how researchers and practitioners can benefit from considering insights from the literature on attitude strength and meta-cognition to improve the persuasive impact of personally matched appeals. After describing this general framework, we summarize a growing body of recently published research showing that the extent to which people hold their traits (and any aspect of the self) with confidence can improve the predictive ability of those traits to guide a wide range of judgments and behaviors. Next, we cover a selection of illustrative, new studies showing that person-situation matches can be strengthened by taking certainty and other meta-cognitive perceptions into account. Then, we discuss avenues for future research, including how confidence in individual differences also can matter for persuasion when people generate messages that match their own personalities. We conclude by noting how considerations of confidence can be applied beyond individual differences to other aspects of the persuasion context.