1984; BRAVE NEW WORLD

Why some messages are more convincing than others

UC San Diego research shows how marketers can choose specific words to boost confidence in a brand’s claim

University of California - San Diego

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What kinds of marketing messages are effective — and what makes people believe certain political slogans more than others? New research from the University of California San Diego Rady School of Management explores how people constantly evaluate whether messages are true or false and finds that a surprisingly small ingredient — whether a word has an easy opposite — can shape how confident people feel when deciding whether a message is true.

“Effective messaging isn’t just about whether people agree with a claim — it’s about how confident they feel in that judgment,” said Giulia Maimone, who conducted the research while a doctoral student at UC San Diego’s Rady School of Management. “Understanding how language shapes that sense of certainty helps explain why some messages resonate more than others.”

Confidence — not just agreement — shapes how persuasive a messages is

The study, forthcoming in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, reveals that the persuasiveness of a message can hinge on the type of words it uses — specifically, whether those words have clear opposites. The research shows that when companies frame a message with words that are “reversible,” meaning they have an easily retrievable opposite (such as intense/mild or guilty/innocent), people who disagree with the claim tend to mentally flip it to the opposite meaning (for example, “The scent is intense” becomes “The scent is mild”). 

Why words with clear opposites are processed differently

The study shows that this difference matters because people handle disagreement in different ways. When a message uses a word with a clear opposite, rejecting the claim requires an extra step retrieving and substituting the opposite word which makes people feel less certain about their opposing belief. But when a word doesn’t have a clear opposite, people tend to negate them by simply adding “not” to the original word (for example, “not prominent” or “not romantic”). In those cases, the study finds that skeptics tend to feel more confident in their counter-belief, making those messages less effective overall. 

A strategic advantage for marketers

“For marketers, this creates a powerful advantage: by using easily reversible words in a positive affirmation — such as ‘the scent is intense’ —  companies can maximize certainty among those who accept the claim while minimizing certainty among people who reject the message, because they tend to feel less strongly about their opposing belief ” said Maimone, who is now a postdoctoral scholar in marketing at the University of Florida. “Our study highlights a subtle but influential linguistic mechanism that helps explain why some marketing and political messages are more effective than others.”

That’s why this matters for marketing. If a company uses a simple, positive claim with an easily reversible word — like “the scent is intense”—most consumers who believe it feel confident in that belief. But even the consumers who disagree tend to feel less sure about their own negative conclusion because flipping the message to the opposite (“it’s mild”) takes extra mental work. In other words, the wording can strengthen the intended message because it can soften the pushback.

“People don’t just decide ‘true’ or ‘false’ — they also form a level of certainty that affects how persuasive a message becomes,” said Uma R. Karmarkar, study coauthor and associate professor at UC San Diego’s Rady School and the School of Global Policy and Strategy.

Testing the effect outside the lab

In a field test with Facebook ads created in collaboration with a nonprofit, the team found that ad language designed to trigger the higher-confidence processing pathway produced a higher click-through rate than language designed to trigger the lower-confidence pathway.

“Language isn’t just how we communicate — it can be a strategic lever,” said On Amir, study coauthor and professor of marketing at the Rady School. “The right wording can help an intended message land more firmly — and make the counter-belief feel less certain.”

How the researchers studied belief confidence

To reach these conclusions, the researchers conducted two controlled experiments involving more than 1,000 participants who were asked to judge whether a variety of statements were true or false and then report how confident they felt in those judgments. By systematically varying the wording type of the statements — and measuring both response time and confidence — the team was able to isolate how different types of language trigger distinct cognitive processes that shape belief certainty.

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Journal

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research

Method of Research

Survey

Article Title

How Word Reversibility Impacts Judgment Confidence

Article Publication Date

23-Mar-2026

New analysis disputes historic earthquake, tsunami and death toll on Greek island

Revision of the Allegedly Deadly and Tsunamigenic 1843 Earthquake at Chalke Island, South Aegean Sea, Greece

Seismological Society of America

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For decades, researchers thought that an October 1843 earthquake on the small Greek island of Chalke caused a powerful tsunami and led to the deaths of as many as 600 people.

But a new analysis of primary accounts of the event by Ioanna Triantafyllou at Hellenic Mediterranean University suggests the truth was much less dramatic and destructive.

As Triantafyllou reports in Seismological Research Letters, evidence from primary sources indicates that the mainshock occurred on Chalke on 17 September 1843, causing rock falls and some damage to poorly constructed houses. There were no deaths and no tsunami reported at the time.

The study demonstrates how secondhand sources of a seismic event can be used to characterize an earthquake incorrectly for years, said Triantafyllou, with impacts on seismic risk calculations for a region.

Without modern instrumentation and data collection, historical seismologists often must sift through accounts of a past earthquake to find clues that allow them to precisely locate the earthquake and estimate its magnitude and intensity.

Triantafyllou has been investigating damaging and deadly earthquakes in Greece since beginning her Ph.D. work in 2017. “I was particularly struck by the 1843 earthquake in Chalke, which remains one of the top 10 deadliest earthquakes in Greece to date. I wondered how a small island could have had 600 casualties at that time,” she said. “I began searching for primary, original historical sources to verify whether the number of victims was indeed so high.”

Previous researchers had concluded that the magnitude of the 1843 Chalke earthquake ranged from 6.4 to 6.75, and had caused a powerful tsunami. A 1848 study reported the earthquake’s death toll to be as high as 600 people.

But when Triantafyllou examined these previous studies, “most of the previous authors either had no access to primary macroseismic information sources or neglected to mention them,” she wrote.

Her search for primary accounts about the earthquake led to contemporary reports in Greek newspapers, a German newspaper, and newspapers published in Constantinople (Istanbul). Triantafyllou also used the contemporary testimony of Ludwig Ross, a German archaeology professor fluent in Greek.

“The further back in time you go, the more difficult it is to find primary sources related to earthquakes. This information can be found in newspapers, archives, church codes, and even in travelers’ writings, as in the case of Ross,” she explained. “In the digital era, the systematic indexing and digitization of relevant information helps researchers gain immediate access to the content.”

The primary sources indicated that seismic activity on the island started at the beginning of September 1843, culminating in a strong damaging earthquake on 17 September, with some aftershocks felt into early October.

“The book by Ross is a good example of a reliable author who kept a detailed diary during his travels in the Greek islands. He documented the effects of earthquakes clearly and accurately in terms of time and space,” said Triantafyllou.

“His earthquake descriptions provide appropriate information for reconstructing the earthquakes and assign macroseismic intensities based on building damage, ground failures and shaking felt,” she added.

Triantafyllou used these macroseismic intensities, or shaking strength, to calculate a new magnitude for the 1843 event, concluding that the mainshock was likely a magnitude 5.93 earthquake.

The magnitudes of historical earthquakes are included in regional earthquake catalogs, which are used to make seismic hazard assessments. “In my study the magnitude of the Chalke 1843 earthquake was drastically reduced in respect to previous estimates,” Triantafyllou explained. “Keeping all other factors equal, one may expect that reducing the magnitude will result in seismic hazard reduction as well.”

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Journal

Seismological Research Letters

DOI

10.1785/0220250358 

Method of Research

Literature review

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Revision of the Allegedly Deadly and Tsunamigenic 1843 Earthquake at Chalke Island, South Aegean Sea, Greece

Article Publication Date

21-Jan-2026

 

UNM researchers analyze moon record, challenging Earth’s water origins

Moon’s 4-billion-year impact record suggests meteorites didn’t supply Earth’s water

University of New Mexico

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image: 

Tony Gargano, Ph.D., in the University of New Mexico's Center for Stable Isotopes.

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Credit: University of New Mexico

A long-standing idea in planetary science is that water-rich meteorites arriving late in Earth’s history could have delivered a major share of Earth’s water. A new study argues that the Moon’s surface record sets a hard limit on that possibility: even under generous assumptions, late meteorite delivery since about 4 billion years ago could only have supplied a small fraction of Earth’s water.

In a paper published in the Proceedings to the National Academy of Sciences titled Constraints on the impactor flux to the Earth–Moon system from oxygen isotopes of the lunar regolith, researchers led by Tony Gargano, Ph.D., at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and The University of New Mexico analyzed a large suite of Apollo lunar regolith samples using high-precision triple oxygen isotopes. Earth has erased most of its early bombardment record through tectonics, and constant crustal recycling. The Moon, by contrast, preserves a continuously accessible archive: lunar regolith, the loose layer of debris produced and reworked by impacts over billions of years.

Ever since the Apollo missions, scientists have tried to read that archive using elements that concentrate in impactors - especially ‘metal-loving’ siderophile elements, which are abundant in meteorites but scarce in the Moon’s silicate crust. But regolith is an especially challenging mixture: impacts can melt, vaporize, and rework material repeatedly, and post-impact geological processes can separate metal from silicate, complicating attempts to reconstruct the type and amount of impactor material.

“The lunar regolith, which is a collection of loose ‘soil’ and broken rock at the surface, acts like a long-term mixing layer,” said Gargano. “It captures impact debris, stirs it in, and preserves those additions for immense spans of time. That is why it is such a powerful archive. It lets us study a time-averaged record of what was hitting the Earth–Moon system.”

The new study takes a different approach. Instead of relying on metal-loving tracers, it uses oxygen - the dominant element by mass in rocks - and its triple-isotope “fingerprint” to separate two competing signals that normally get tangled in lunar regolith: (1) the addition of meteorite material and (2) isotopic effects from impact-driven vaporization. From measuring offsets in the oxygen isotope composition of regolith, the team finds that at least ~1% by mass of the regolith reservoir consists of impactor-derived material that are best explained from carbon-rich meteorites that were partially vaporized upon impact.

“Triple oxygen isotopes give us a more direct and quantitative way to approach the problem. Oxygen is the dominant element in most rocks, and the triple-isotope framework helps us distinguish true mixing between different reservoirs from the isotopic effects of impact-driven vaporization,” said Gargano. “In practice, that lets us isolate an impactor fingerprint from a regolith that has a complicated history, with fewer assumptions and a clearer chain from measurement to interpretation.”

The team translated these impactor fractions into water-delivery bounds for the Moon and Earth, expressed in Earth-ocean equivalents for scale. For the Moon, the implied delivery since ~ 4 billion years ago is tiny on an Earth-ocean scale. But tiny compared to Earth’s oceans does not mean unimportant for the Moon. Instead, the Moon’s accessible water inventory is concentrated in small, cold-trapped reservoirs, and water is the kind of resource that matters immediately for sustained human presence for important things like life support, radiation shielding, and fuel. In other words, the long-term trickle of impactor-derived water can be negligible for Earth yet still be a meaningful contributor to the Moon’s available water budget.

The researchers then extended the same accounting to Earth, using a commonly applied scaling in which Earth receives substantially more impactor material than the Moon. Even if Earth experienced roughly 20× the impactor flux and even adopting the extreme megaregolith end-member, the cumulative water delivers only a few percent of an Earth Ocean at most. That makes it difficult to reconcile the late-delivery of water-rich meteorites as the dominant source of Earth’s water, given that independent estimates yield several ocean-mass equivalents of water in the Earth in total.

“The lunar regolith is one of the rare places we can still interpret a time-integrated record of what was hitting Earth’s neighborhood for billions of years,” said Gargano. “The oxygen-isotope fingerprint lets us pull an impactor signal out of a mixture that’s been melted, vaporized, and reworked countless times. The main takeaway from our study is that Earth’s water budget is hard, if not impossible, to explain if we only consider a single, late delivery pathway from water-rich impactors from the outer solar system. Even though some meteorite types carry a lot of water, their broader chemical and isotopic fingerprints are quite exotic relative to Earth. Habitability models have to satisfy such empirical constraints, and our study adds a constraint that future theories will need to reproduce.”

“Our results don’t say meteorites delivered no water,” added Simon. “They say the Moon’s long-term record makes it very hard for late meteorite delivery to be the dominant source of Earth’s oceans.”

Gargano framed the work as part of a scientific lineage that began with Apollo. “I’m part of the next generation of Apollo scientists - people who didn’t fly the missions, but who were trained on the samples and the questions Apollo made possible,” Gargano said. “The value of the Moon is that it gives us ground truth: real material we can measure in the lab and use to anchor what we infer from meteorites and telescopes.

“Apollo samples are the reference point for comparing the Moon to the broader Solar System,” Gargano added. “When we put lunar soils and meteorites on the same oxygen-isotope scale, we’re testing ideas about what kinds of bodies were supplying water to the inner Solar System. That’s ultimately a question about why Earth became habitable, and how the ingredients for life were assembled here in the first place.”

Apollo samples also matter because the Moon preserves that impact story across deep time in a way Earth does not. The Moon does not just tell us about the Moon. It preserves an accessible record of the impact environment of the inner solar system, which helped set the boundary conditions under which Earth became habitable. There is still real wonder in that. Scientists have rocks collected decades ago, from another world, and they are still capable of changing how we think about the origin of Earth’s water and the conditions that made life possible.

“What modern techniques add to this amazing legacy of scientific exploration is precision and interpretive power. We can now resolve subtle isotopic signals that allow quantitative tests of formation and habitability models,” said Gargano. “That is why Apollo science keeps evolving. The samples are the same, but our ability to interrogate them, and the questions we can ask of them, are fundamentally better.”

In addition to his research findings, Gargano is equally proud of what scientists are doing in terms of training and outreach because it captures that same arc: taking something that feels distant and making it tangible and impactful to our lives.

“At UNM, I have been training Albuquerque high schoolers in planetary science and geochemistry, including senior Brooklyn Bird and junior Violet Delu from the Bosque School,” said Gargano. “These students are getting hands-on training in geochemistry using UNM’s unique collection of Astromaterials, and they are learning the physical craft of laboratory science: how to prepare and handle samples, how to make high-quality measurements, and how to think clearly about uncertainty and reproducibility.

“But the deeper lesson is the transformation that happens when a student realizes they can hold a piece of another world, make a measurement, and pull meaning out of it. They learn how a chemical signal becomes a geologic story, and how that story scales up into an explanation for how a planetary body evolved to become the way it is. Experiences like that change what students think is possible for themselves. They build confidence, technical ability, and a sense of belonging in a field that can otherwise feel out of reach.”

Bird and Delu will both be presenting their independent research projects at the 57th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference this spring and will also be educators to their peers and younger students through Bosque School outreach events. This is a model Gargano is excited to carry forward to other places in the country, so that more underserved students can gain access to world-class research experiences and obtain skill sets in geochemistry that open doors for them internationally.

Image from Apollo 17 mission.

Credit

NASA

UNM's Institute of Meteoritics Meteorite Museum.

Credit

University of New Mexico

Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2531796123 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Constraints on the impactor flux to the Earth–Moon system from oxygen isotopes of the lunar regolith

Article Publication Date

20-Jan-2026