Complexly worded petitions gather more signatures

If you're setting up an online petition, you should use common words and simple sentences to draw people in — right? Well, though that might intuitively seem like the best approach, according to new work by David Markowitz at the University of Oregon, it's completely wrong. Markowitz's analysis of more than a million petitions in eight different languages revealed that less readable petitions, with fewer common words and more complex writing patterns got the most signatures.  

Markowitz gathered these petitions from five public databases in February 2022. Three held petitions written in English (the UK Government and Parliament Petitions database, for example). The other two, the Change and Global Petitions websites, held petitions in various languages. Markowitz's final sample included petitions in German, Romanian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Spanish, Italian, and English. 

For each petition, Markowitz used text analysis tools to first measure the frequency of common words. For those written in English, he also gathered data on two other measures: 'structural fluency' and analytic writing. Structural fluency equates to readability. Petitions with relatively long sentences and more syllables and sentences got low scores on this. The analytic writing score was a measure of the relative complexity and formality of the writing style. 

Markowitz found consistent results. Petitions with fewer common words, and more complex and more analytic writing tended to receive more online support. For the two petition databases that included markers of success (for the UK Parliament and Petitions database, for example, that meant achieving enough signatures to require a response from the UK government), more complex text was also linked to a higher chance of success. 

"This evidence is crucial, because it suggests that words link to action and change, not just the magnitude of support," Markowitz writes. 

These results might seem surprising, but in fact, there's plenty of research finding that in some circumstances, we prefer common words and simple language. However, these tend to be situations in which we don't perceive the writer to be attempting to achieve a valuable goal — when someone is composing a Twitter post, for example. There is some evidence that in settings in which effort is valued, or when people believe that someone is trying to attain an important goal, greater complexity can be viewed positively, rather than a negatively.

For this new study, more complex petitions might have attracted more signatures because readers inferred that more effort had gone into them. This may have been used as a mental shortcut to infer that the goal of the petition was relatively important. However, more research is needed to confirm whether this is the case. It is possible that the goals of petitions featuring more complex language were relatively more important, and that — rather than the writing style — is what drew more signatures. Further studies with a separate group of participants who also rank petition goals for importance could help to explore this. 

For those aiming to gather support for a cause, this work does at least suggest that when it comes to creating online petitions, striving to create a succinct, easy read might hinder rather than help your chance of success. So, compose wisely!

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000333