The Detailedness Effect: The superior dimension of language abstraction

Abstract

This study proposed a novel conceptualisation of language abstraction by drawing on both graded abstraction (GA) and linguistic category model (LCM), which have never been jointly examined before. Existing literature looks at either one or the other, which resulted in both conceptualisations being examined in different contexts and discipline; LCM has been largely confined to the social psychology literature and GA to the marketing literature. Looking at the conceptualisations in isolation resulted in many studies mislabelling details as concrete information, which misrepresented their respective impact on persuasion. To provide a solution to this conundrum, the current research compares and contrasts LCM and GA by combining them under one study. The ultimate outcome of this joint examination is that the novel conceptualisation of language abstraction now has two dimensions: detailedness and concreteness, which was previously considered to be limited to the concrete- abstract dimension. This study investigated the persuasive impact of language abstraction in the context of social media advertising. The experiment required the respondents to read an ad description about a fictional smartphone brand, which was created with concrete language (operationalised by LCM) and detailed language (operationalised by GA). The results suggested that previous studies have exaggerated the impact of concrete language. In comparison to abstract language, concrete language is still more impactful on the dependent variables, but when compared to detailedness, concrete language has almost no effect. Overall, these results suggest a superior detailedness effect over the concreteness effect, which is a novel discovery from this study.