TARES Self-Audit

Minutes

Before a campaign, advertisement, fundraising appeal, or pitch goes out, test it against the five TARES duties: Truthfulness of the message, Authenticity of the persuader, Respect for the audience, Equity of the appeal, and Social responsibility for the common good.

How to do it

  1. 1Truthfulness: go beyond literal accuracy. Would the overall impression a reasonable audience member takes away be true? Have you omitted something whose absence makes the message misleading? Technically true statements used to create a false belief fail this test.
  2. 2Authenticity: would you make this appeal in your own name, to people you care about? Do you believe in the thing being promoted, and would you be comfortable if the audience could see your motives and methods?
  3. 3Respect: does the message treat its audience as people capable of deciding for themselves, giving them what they need to choose well? Or does it work by getting around their judgment through manufactured urgency, shame, or confusion?
  4. 4Equity: is the appeal fair given who will receive it? Would you consider it fair if you were on the receiving end with their knowledge, their circumstances, and their vulnerabilities? Pay particular attention to children, people in distress or debt, the newly bereaved, and anyone who cannot easily evaluate the claim.
  5. 5Social responsibility: if the campaign succeeds completely, who is affected beyond the buyer and the seller, and is the wider result one you would defend?
  6. 6Write a one-line answer to each and record who signed it off. A principle that fails gets a fix or a documented decision by someone accountable; "we ran out of time" is not a finding. Have someone outside the project team do the audit where you can.

When to use it

  • •Before launching any persuasive campaign: commercial, political, charitable, public-health, or internal.
  • •When a tactic is legal and tests well but some of the team are uneasy about it.
  • •When drawing on the techniques catalogued on this site for your own communication.
  • •When reviewing agency, vendor, or AI-generated creative work that you did not write.

Counters

PalteringCard StackingCherry PickingDark PatternsFake ReviewsUndisclosed SponsorshipNative Advertising DeceptionGreenwashingHealth-WashingCause-WashingPrecision MicrotargetingPain Point AmplificationFOMO MarketingArtificial Time PressureTestimonial EngineeringAstroturf BotsAstroturfingConfirmshaming

Evidence and how strong it is

The TARES test was proposed by Baker and Martinson (2001) as a framework of prima facie duties for professional persuaders, grounded in the argument that persuasion is ethically justified only when it serves ends beyond the persuader's own and respects the audience as ends in themselves. It is a normative framework. It is widely taught in advertising and public-relations ethics and has been used by researchers as a coding scheme for evaluating campaigns, but there is no evidence that organizations using it produce less deceptive work, and it has been criticized as hard to operationalize because the five principles overlap and call for judgment. Its respect and truthfulness principles align with philosophical accounts of what makes influence manipulative, namely that it bypasses or subverts the target's rational agency (Noggle 1996; Sunstein 2016). The general finding from research on ethical decision-making that structured prompts and accountability to an outside reviewer improve deliberation offers indirect support for the audit format. Evidence strength: scholarly and professional consensus about the framework as an ethical standard; no empirical evidence of effectiveness as a practice.

Cautions
  • Self-audits are vulnerable to motivated reasoning. The people who built the campaign are the worst placed to judge it; an outside reviewer with the power to say no is what gives the exercise teeth.
  • It is an ethical test, not a legal one. Passing it does not establish compliance with advertising, consumer-protection, election, or data-protection law, and failing it is not by that fact unlawful.
  • The principles are broad enough to be satisfied rhetorically. Require specific answers tied to specific elements of the creative work, not general statements of good intent.
  • An audit completed after launch, or one that cannot stop a launch, is documentation, not governance.
  1. Baker, S., & Martinson, D. L. (2001). The TARES test: Five principles for ethical persuasion. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 16(2-3), 148-175
    The original statement of the five TARES principles and the argument for them as duties of professional persuaders.
  2. Noggle, R. (1996). Manipulative actions: A conceptual and moral analysis. American Philosophical Quarterly, 33(1), 43-55
    The philosophical account of manipulation as influence that leads the target away from their own ideals of belief, desire, and emotion.
  3. Sunstein, C. R. (2016). Fifty shades of manipulation. Journal of Marketing Behavior, 1(3-4), 213-244
    The definition of manipulation as influence that does not sufficiently engage or appeal to people's capacity for reflective choice.
Last reviewed

More in Campaign integrity (for teams that persuade)

The Front-Page Test

Ask whether you would be comfortable seeing the tactic, including how it works and why you chose it, described accurately on the front page of a newspaper read by your audience; if the tactic only works when the audience does not know about it, treat that as a finding.

Harm-Class Inventory

List every persuasive element in a campaign, tag each one as neutral craft, dual-use, or manipulative by design, and for each dual-use element write down where the line is and which side of it you are on.

Disclosure Checklist

Before publishing sponsored, affiliated, incentivized, or endorsed content, check that every material connection between the speaker and the brand or cause is disclosed clearly, conspicuously, in plain language, and in the same place and format as the claim it qualifies.

Vulnerable-Audience Screen

Before launch, ask who will actually receive the message, which of them are least able to evaluate or resist it, and what it does to them; then change the targeting, the tactic, or the safeguards so that the campaign does not get its results from the people least able to say no.

Red-Team Your Campaign

Before launch, give people who did not build the campaign the explicit job of attacking it as a skeptical journalist, a regulator, a competitor, a harmed customer, and a bad actor would, and fix what they find while it is still cheap to fix.

Decide Metrics Before Testing

Before an A/B test or pilot starts, write down the primary metric, the harm metrics that must not get worse, the sample size or stopping rule, and the planned analysis, so that the result can tell you something you did not already want to hear.