Grammatical Subject, Base Rates, and Persuasion

Companies often make claims about the success rates of their products and/or the failure rates of competitors' products. We examine whether changes in the grammatical subject used in these claims affect persuasion. Specifically, we differentiate between user-subjects, where users are the grammatical subject of the sentence, and product subjects, where the product is the grammatical subject of the sentence. For example, the success of a weight loss program can be presented either with a user-subject claim stating that "80% of participants succeed in reducing their excess weight" or with a product-subject claim stating that our program succeeds in reducing excess weight for 80% of participants. This work makes several contributions. First, it contributes to research on linguistic framing in a significant manner: Whereas most examples of verbal framing examine changes in specific words, our work examines changes in syntax, which can, in principle, be applied to a broader variety of marketing communications of product success and failure. Second, it contributes to research on causality.