The Best Persuasion Involves Sex Appeal, Humor, and Comparisons
How the best persuasion tactics balance effectiveness and affiliation.
Posted February 25, 2026 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Key points
- When we try to persuade, we often face a choice between focusing on being effective or liked by others.
- This occurs because effectiveness comes from creating arousal, whereas liking comes from positive feelings.
- Fortunately, approaches that promote both excitement and positivity are also most liked and successful!
Persuasion can be challenging because it often involves two different goals. On one hand, we want our persuasive approach to be successful at changing the opinions and behaviors of others in our favor. On the other hand, we also want the appeal to be likeable and improve our relationships with others, too.
Sometimes, however, those two goals can be in conflict. Specifically, a persuasive approach may be successful and effective at changing behaviors, but disliked and destructive to our relationships. With that problem in mind, Hornik, Ofir, and Rachamim (2016) conducted a meta-analysis on over 1,200 advertising experiments to explore the relationship between the likeability and success of various types of persuasive appeals. Their results highlighted the best approaches we can take to be both likeable and persuasive. So, let’s take a look!
Types of Messaging
Hornik, Ofir, and Rachamim (2016) began their analysis by reviewing different kinds of persuasive messaging. The goal was to identify specific types of messages and categorize them through various features. In doing so, the team identified 7 types of persuasive appeals:
- Sex Appeals involve using attraction and physical desirability to create positive emotions and arousal in others. This approach both maintains attention and is psychologically rewarding.
- Humor Appeals incorporate irony and playfulness to initiate positive emotions and arousal. As a result, this method also captures attention and is rewarding.
- Comparative Appeals highlight various similarities and differences to impact the decision-making of others. This technique influences how people experience and compare their options when making a choice.
- Fear Appeals communicate undesirable or loss-related possibilities to induce negative emotions and arousal. This tactic also captures attention but motivates others to avoid punishing outcomes instead.
- Metaphor Appeals use stories, images, or associations with tangible things to influence what something means to a person (either emotionally or rationally). This approach also highlights similarities and differences, but often in a more subtle manner.
- Framed Appeals focus attention on what can be gained or lost in a situation to engage the reasoning of others. This process impacts choice by directing thoughts toward positive outcomes and rewards (gain-framed) or negative outcomes and punishments (loss-framed).
- Two-Sided Appeals employ a balanced presentation of reasons for and against a choice to fully engage the logic and reasoning of others. This approach helps to better inform the individual of the pros and cons of a decision.
Effectiveness vs. Likeability
Further comparisons by Hornik, Ofir, and Rachamim (2016) found that all 7 approaches were significantly more effective and likeable than neutral control messages. Beyond that, however, appeals differed in terms of whether they were targeted more toward excitement or reason, as well as whether they were more positive or negative in tone. Those differences also related to how successful each message type was in persuading the recipient, and how much the recipient came to like the message too.
First, they found that arousal is often more effective than logic. Persuasive approaches that hooked people’s feelings and got them excited were generally more successful than those appealing to cooler logic. Thus, the most effective approaches involved sex and humor (r = .46, .35), followed by comparison and fear (r = .19, .16), and with framed, metaphor, and two-sided appeals as least effective ((r = .14, .13, .11).
Second, they determined that positive is often more likeable than negative. Persuasive approaches that had a positive tone (e.g., focused on rewards) were generally more liked than those that had a neutral or negative tone (e.g., focused on punishments). As a result, sex and humor appeals were also the most liked (r = .39, .38), followed by comparison and metaphor (r = .15, .15), with fear, framed, and two-sided approaches as least liked (r = .12, .11, .09).
Being Persuasive and Appealing
Given the results above, there appear to be three main steps for being a successful and likeable persuader. First, use sexy appeals to create attraction and arousal. Second, add some humor to keep things positive and exciting too. Third, make favorable comparisons to affiliate with others and motivate them toward your way of thinking.
As I discuss in my book Attraction Psychology, those persuasive approaches are also essential skills for appealing to romantic partners and developing intimate relationships (Nicholson, 2022). On the relationship psychology side of things, however, those terms simply have different names. Instead of sex appeals, relationship information discusses ways of being attractive. Appeals to humor and playfulness become flirting techniques and flirting styles. Making comparisons turns into deciding who is attractive and compatible as a partner. The words are different, but the underlying processes are the same.
In fact, these similarities occur because both persuasion and romantic attraction operate on the same foundation—emotion. Specifically, as explained by Russell (1980), our emotions are created from the combination of two different experiences. On one hand, they contain our feelings of arousal (high vs. low excitement) toward a person or object. On the other hand, emotions also encompass our feelings of valence (positive vs. negative) about a person or object.
That link to emotions explains why creating excitement and using rewards are essential components of persuasion. It also explains why exciting activities and rewarding interactions are necessary to build satisfying relationships. Taken together, then, by being arousing and positive, you help to ensure both persuasion success and relationship solidarity too!
