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This study aims to examine how social engineers use persuasion principles during vishing attacks.

In total, 86 examples of real-world vishing attacks were found in articles and videos. Each example was coded to determine which persuasion principles were present in that attack and how they were implemented, i.e. what specific elements of the attack contributed to the presence of each persuasion principle.

Authority (A), social proof (S) and distraction (D) were the most widely used persuasion principles in vishing attacks, followed by liking, similarity and deception (L). These four persuasion principles occurred in a majority of vishing attacks, while commitment, reciprocation and consistency (C) did not. Further, certain sets of persuasion principles (i.e. authority, distraction, liking, similarity, and deception and social proof; , authority, commitment, reciprocation, and consistency, distraction, liking, similarity and deception, and social proof; and authority, distraction and social proof) were used more than others. It was noteworthy that despite their similarities, those sets of persuasion principles were implemented in different ways, and certain specific ways of implementing certain persuasion principles (e.g. vishers claiming to have authority over the victim) were quite rare.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate how social engineers use persuasion principles during vishing attacks. As such, it provides important insight into how social engineers implement vishing attacks and lays a critical foundation for future research investigating the psychological aspects of vishing attacks. The present results have important implications for vishing countermeasures and education.

This study aims to investigate how phishers apply persuasion principles and construct deceptive URLs in mobile instant messaging (MIM) phishing.

In total, 67 examples of real-world MIM phishing attacks were collected from various online sources. Each example was coded using established guidelines from the literature to identify the persuasion principles, and the URL construction techniques employed.

The principles of social proof, liking and authority were the most widely used in MIM phishing, followed by scarcity and reciprocity. Most phishing examples use three persuasion principles, often a combination of authority, liking and social proof. In contrast to email phishing but similar to vishing, the social proof principle was the most commonly used in MIM phishing. Phishers implement the social proof principle in different ways, most commonly by claiming that other users have already acted (e.g. crafting messages that indicate the sender has already benefited from the scam). In contrast to email, retail and fintech companies are the most commonly targeted in MIM phishing. Furthermore, phishers created deceptive URLs using multiple URL obfuscation techniques, often using spoofed domains, to make the URL complex by adding random characters and using homoglyphs.

The insights from this study provide a theoretical foundation for future research on the psychological aspects of phishing in MIM apps. The study provides recommendations that software developers should consider when developing automated anti-phishing solutions for MIM apps and proposes a set of MIM phishing awareness training tips.

This paper aims to respond to issues posed in the four commentaries on Armstrong, Du, Green and Graefe (2016, this issue) regarding the immediate usefulness of that paper’s test of advertisements’ compliance with persuasion principles, and regarding the need for further research.

This paper addresses commentators’ concerns using logic, prior research findings and further analyses of the data.

The superiority of the index method remains when a simple, theory-based, alternative weighting-scheme is used in the index model. Combinations of three unaided experts’ forecasts were more accurate than the individual forecasts, but the gain was only one-third of the gain achieved by using the Persuasion Principles Index (PPI).

Replications and extensions using behavioral data and alternative implementations of the index method would help to better assess the effects of judging conformity with principles as a means of predicting relative advertising effectiveness. Advertisers can expect more accurate pretest results if they combine the predictions of three experts or, even better, if they use tests of compliance with persuasion principles, such as the PPI. The PPI software is copyrighted, but is available now and is free to use.

New analysis and findings provide further support for the claim that advertisers who use the PPI approach proposed by Armstrong, Du, Green and Graefe (2016, this issue) to choose among alternative advertisements will be more profitable than those who do not.

The purpose of this paper is to provide commentary on Armstrong, Du, Green and Graefe’s (this issue) article.

The paper is based on reading and thinking about Armstrong et al.’s article.

One appealing way that advertising practice can be evidence-based is by applying dependable generalizations about what makes for effective ads. Armstrong et al.’s article offers data concerning the application of Armstrong’s persuasive advertising: Evidence-Based Principles (2010) persuasion principles. The article does not provide convincing evidence for the predictive validity of the principles, but it does offer a clear proof-of-concept demonstration of the feasibility of principles-based advertising assessment.

The paper’s value lies in its clarification of what claims Armstrong et al.’s data do and do not underwrite.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Armstrong et al.’s (2016) finding that ads that more closely follow evidence-based persuasion principles also achieve higher day-after-recall.

The author evaluates the importance of Armstrong et al.’s result and considers the criticisms that their work only examines some aspects of persuasion and that their dependent variable is known to have a low correlation with sales.

Armstrong et al.’s result provides a major advance in the knowledge of persuasive advertising. While they do not examine all aspects of persuasion, the scope of their tests is still very extensive. Day-after-recall is also arguably a better measure of advertising effectiveness than sales impact, due to the difficulty of identifying small sales changes among the random fluctuations that constantly occur in most markets and given the known processes by which consumer memory operates.

By synthesising prior work on advertising and consumer memory, the author provides a simple model of how advertising interacts with memory. This model explains why ad recall ought to be poorly correlated with sales, and highlights the need for Armstrong et al.’s result to be followed by further research into how contextual cues at the point of purchase affect memory retrieval and brand choice.

Distinguishing phishing emails from legitimate emails continues to be a difficult task for most individuals. This study aims to investigate the psycholinguistic factors associated with deception in phishing email text and their effect on end-user ability to discriminate phishing emails from legitimate emails.

Email messages and end-user decisions collected from a laboratory phishing study were validated and analyzed using natural language processing methods (Linguistic Inquiry Word Count) and penalized regression models (LASSO and Elastic Net) to determine the linguistic dimensions that attackers may use in phishing emails to deceive end-users and measure the impact of such choices on end-user susceptibility to phishing.

We found that most participants, who played the role of a phisher in the study, chose to deceive their end-user targets by pretending to be a familiar individual and presenting time pressure or deadlines. Results show that use of words conveying certainty (e.g. always, never) and work-related features in the phishing messages predicted higher end-user vulnerability. On the contrary, use of words that convey achievement (e.g. earn, win) or reward (cash, money) in the phishing messages predicted lower end-user vulnerability because such features are usually observed in scam-like messages.

Insights from this research show that analyzing emails for psycholinguistic features associated with computer-mediated deception could be used to fine-tune and improve spam and phishing detection technologies. This research also informs the kinds of phishing attacks that must be prioritized in antiphishing training programs.

Applying natural language processing and statistical modeling methods to analyze results from a laboratory phishing experiment to understand deception from both attacker and end-user is novel. Furthermore, results from this work advance our understanding of the linguistic factors associated with deception in phishing email text and its impact on end-user susceptibility.

This paper aims to test whether a structured application of persuasion principles might help improve advertising decisions. Evidence-based principles are currently used to improve decisions in other complex situations, such as those faced in engineering and medicine.

Scores were calculated from the ratings of 17 self-trained novices who rated 96 matched pairs of print advertisements for adherence to evidence-based persuasion principles. Predictions from traditional methods – 10,809 unaided judgments from novices and 2,764 judgments from people with some expertise in advertising and 288 copy-testing predictions – provided benchmarks.

A higher adherence-to-principles-score correctly predicted the more effective advertisement for 75 per cent of the pairs. Copy testing was correct for 59 per cent, and expert judgment was correct for 55 per cent. Guessing would provide 50 per cent accurate predictions. Combining judgmental predictions led to substantial improvements in accuracy.

Advertisements for high-involvement utilitarian products were tested on the assumption that persuasion principles would be more effective for such products. The measure of effectiveness that was available –day-after-recall – is a proxy for persuasion or behavioral measures.

Pretesting advertisements by assessing adherence to evidence-based persuasion principles in a structured way helps in deciding which advertisements would be best to run. That procedure also identifies how to make an advertisement more effective.

This is the first study in marketing, and in advertising specifically, to test the predictive validity of evidence-based principles. In addition, the study provides the first test of the predictive validity of the index method for a marketing problem.

This study aims to independently test the predictive validity of the Persuasion Principles Index (PPI) for video advertisements for low-involvement products with a measure of in-market sales effectiveness. This study follows the inaugural test conducted by Armstrong et al. (2016) for print advertisements for high-involvement utilitarian products with a measure of advertising recall.

The method was in line with that developed by Armstrong et al. (2016) for rating advertisements and assessing the reliability of ratings. Consensus PPI scores were calculated for a data set of 242 matched pairs of television advertisements. For each pair, the authors determined whether the advertisement that better adhered to the persuasion principles performed better in-market.

Consensus PPI scores predicted the more sales effective television advertisement for 55% (confidence interval (CI) = 49%, 61%) of the 242 pairs. This result is no better than chance and much weaker than the result from the initial validation study, which found that the consensus PPI scores predicted the more recalled print advertisement for 74.5% (CI = 66%, 83%) of 96 pairs.

This study replicated the application of the PPI as per Armstrong’s guidelines and extended validity testing to a different set of advertising conditions. Findings indicate that better adherence to the persuasion principles produces only a weak, positive effect for predicting the performance of television advertisements for low-involvement products. A research agenda that flows from the results is discussed.

The authors suggest that the PPI in its present form is best used to predict advertising performance under conditions as per the inaugural validation test (Armstrong et al., 2016).

Advertisers will require compelling evidence of the PPI’s predictive accuracy to adopt the tool for pre-testing advertising. This study is the first independent test of the predictive validity of the PPI and its generalisability across advertising conditions. Another contribution of this study is the assessment of Armstrong’s advice to remove unreliable ratings. The authors show that this procedure, surprisingly, does not improve the predictive accuracy of the PPI.

This paper aims to consider whether ethical persuasion can be part of public relations practice.

The paper contends that the critical issue for practitioners is not whether they engage in persuasion, but whether they do so ethically. Accordingly, a definition of ethical persuasion is derived by examining unethical propaganda. The paper then considers what standard might be used to assess the ethics of persuasion. The notion of “the public interest” – ubiquitously linked to ethical practice in public relations – is considered but found to be too elusive to guide the practice individual practitioners. Other more assessable standards are identified, as is a guiding approach to ethics. The approach to ethics adopted in this paper is rule utilitarianism. The methodology of this paper is deductive and derivative analysis, argument and synthesis, drawn from a broad body of literature.

Persuasion can be ethical, and a definition of ethical persuasion is proffered. The public interest is not a standard that individual practitioners can determine, decide, know, or apply to assess the ethics of their practice. Ethical persuasion can, however, be assessed using other standards, discussed in the paper. Consequently, a set of criteria and standards to practicing ethical persuasion is developed.

The paper does not extend into a discussion of practical persuasive techniques. Therefore, an extension of this examination could consider a thorough assessment of the ethics of practical persuasive communication techniques.

Directly relevant to the daily work of public relations practitioners, communicators, adertisers and marketers, who are interested in acting ethically. The paper provide a basis for a guide to assessing the ethics of persuasive practice.

This paper confronts both the question of whether practitioners can use the notion of the public interest to assess the ethics of practice, and also what constitutes ethical (and unethical) persuasion, and considers how persuation can be used ethically.

This paper aims to show how environment-related worldview beliefs, in addition to specific persuasion knowledge, can influence how a consumer responds to ads about corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects.

Two experiments manipulated ad copy and consumers’ persuasion knowledge to examine the effects of consumers’ environmental worldview beliefs on their judgments of a firm’s CSR reforestation project.

When an ad presented ambiguous information, both consumers’ persuasion knowledge and their environmental worldview influenced the attribution of the firm’s motives. When an ad presented environment-specific information, however, consumers’ worldview did not influence their attribution of motives. Attributions, in turn, predicted attitudes toward the ad and attitudes toward the brand and were associated with intentions for information-seeking and referral behavior.

A consumer’s core beliefs can play an important role in understanding the application of persuasion knowledge, and the reinforcement-of-meaning principle expands the persuasion knowledge model’s explanatory power.

Marketing communications that involve social responsibility projects must take into account how core beliefs can influence the way consumers respond to projects.

This research demonstrates the importance of worldview beliefs in communication that takes place in the public sphere.

The experiments’ results contribute to a more robust understanding of the persuasion knowledge model, particularly as it applies to CSR messages and introduces the reinforcement-of-meaning principle.