How Much Does Persuasion Strategy Matter? LLM-Annotated Evidence from Charitable Donation Dialogues
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Which persuasion strategies, if any, are associated with donation compliance?Answering this requires fine-grained strategy labels across a full corpus and statistical tests corrected for multiple comparisons.We annotate all 10,600 persuader turns in the 1,017-dialogue PersuasionForGood corpus (Wang et al., 2019), where donation outcomes are directly observable, with a taxonomy of 41 strategies in 11 categories, using three open-source large language models (LLMs; Qwen3:30b, Mistral-Small-3.2,Phi-4).Strategy categories alone explain little variance in donation outcome (pseudo R 2 ≈ 0.015, consistent across all three annotators).Guilt Induction is the only strategy significantly associated with lower donation rates (∆ ≈ -23 percentage points), an effect that replicates across all three models despite only moderate inter-model agreement.Reciprocity is the most robust positive correlate.Target sentiment and interest predict whether a donation occurs but show at most a weak correlation with donation amount.These findings suggest that strategy identification alone is insufficient to explain persuasion effectiveness, and that guilt-based appeals may be counterproductive in prosocial settings.We release the fully annotated corpus as a public resource.
Authors: Tatiana Petrova, Stanislav Sokol, Radu State
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7166572483