Problem, Agitate, Solve has three steps, and most people remember only the middle one. It’s also the step where drafts go wrong.
The case for agitation usually rests on one claim: a loss hurts about twice as much as an equivalent gain pleases. A real research literature sits behind that claim. It’s narrower and less settled than the version that circulates in copywriting circles, and the gap matters when you’re deciding how hard to press on a reader’s pain.
What PAS asks of a draft
PAS opens by naming a problem in the reader’s own terms, then describes what follows if it stays unsolved, then offers a way out. It suits a reader who already feels the problem and hasn’t settled on a fix. Dan Kennedy, a direct-response copywriter, has said he defaults to it.
Each step has a test. The problem step passes if your reader would say the sentence out loud to a colleague. “Our content process needs work” fails. “The post I approved on Tuesday isn’t the one that went live” passes.
The agitate step passes if each consequence follows from the problem and the reader recognises it from their own week. The solve step passes if the reader leaves with something they can do, whether or not they ever buy anything.
Here’s a composite example for a LinkedIn post. It isn’t a case study.
Your LinkedIn approvals live in three places: a doc, a chat thread and somebody’s inbox.
So the version the founder signed off on Tuesday isn’t always the one that goes live on Thursday, and nobody finds out until a comment arrives.
Pick one place where the current version lives, and one person who can call it final. Everything else is a notification.
The solution there is a habit, not a product. That’s deliberate. A post can finish the sequence without selling anything, and the reader still walks away with something.
What the research behind agitation supports
The number behind “losses hurt twice as much” is a loss aversion coefficient from prospect theory. The best-known estimate, 2.25, comes from a 1992 paper by Tversky and Kahneman and rests on a single study of 25 graduate students.
A 2024 meta-analysis has since pooled 607 estimates from 150 articles across economics, psychology and neuroscience. It puts the mean at 1.955, with a 95 percent probability that the true value falls between 1.820 and 2.102. So “about twice” is a fair average across that literature.
It’s an average, though, and it moves with how people measure it. Another 2024 meta-analysis, limited to choices between risky prospects, found a lower value of 1.31 (95 percent interval 1.10 to 1.53). A 2022 study found loss aversion at a $100 stake, with a mean of 1.54, but not for smaller amounts once gains and losses were presented symmetrically.
All of these studies measure choices about money or goods. The sources reviewed here include none that tests loss framing in a B2B article or a LinkedIn post. Carrying the result from a lab gamble to a paragraph about approvals is an inference. It’s a reasonable one, but it is still an inference.
A closer match to what agitation does in copy is the research on fear appeals: messages that warn about a risk and recommend a response. A 2015 meta-analysis pooled 127 articles (248 independent samples, 27,372 participants) and found a positive average effect on attitudes, intentions and behaviour, at d = 0.29. It identified no circumstances in which fear appeals backfired. Effects were larger when the message included efficacy statements, meaning a credible case that the recommended action would work, and when it depicted high susceptibility and severity.
The average effect is modest, and the abstract doesn’t say whether it carries over to B2B content. Our reading is that agitation can work, and that the most consistent lever in this research is the way out, not the pain. A draft should spend its words accordingly. That’s an editorial judgment, not a finding of the review.
Where the agitation step goes wrong
The middle step fails in five ways, and each has a fix.
- It agitates a problem the reader hasn’t noticed. Eugene Schwartz’s five stages of awareness, from his 1966 book Breakthrough Advertising, run from unaware to problem-aware, solution-aware, product-aware and most aware. Copywriters conventionally match PAS to the problem-aware reader, who feels the pain but doesn’t yet know a fix exists. That’s practitioner convention, not a measured result. If your reader hasn’t noticed the problem, naming it comes first, and the agitation can wait.
- It keeps going after the reader has agreed. In a short post, one consequence does the work. A second and a third add length, and the reader starts to feel managed rather than understood.
- It puts a made-up price on inaction. Some PAS guidance asks you to quantify the cost of doing nothing in lost revenue or wasted hours. If you have a measured figure, use it with its period and context. If you don’t, describe the consequence in plain terms. A number nobody can trace loses the one reader who checks.
- It blames people. “Your team is disorganised” agitates by insult. “The work sits in places that don’t talk to each other” describes the same pain and leaves the reader’s competence alone. Put the fault in the system, not the person.
- It leaves the reader with the pain and no next step. The fear-appeal research points the same way: the way out carries as much weight as the warning.
The expanded version Kennedy describes adds a step that invalidates every solution except the writer’s own. We’d leave it out. A marketer with a spreadsheet that works will notice, and suggesting it doesn’t is the quickest way to lose them.
PAS, BAB and PASTOR: choosing between them
PAS: Problem, Agitate, Solve. When the reader already feels the problem and hasn’t chosen a fix.
BAB: Before, After, Bridge. When the reader responds more to a better future than to what’s wrong now.
PASTOR: Problem, Amplify, Story, Transformation, Offer, Response. For a longer piece with a real story and real proof.
BAB shows the reader a better future and then the path to it, so it leans on aspiration where PAS leans on loss. PASTOR, created by copywriter Ray Edwards, stretches PAS to six steps by adding a story, a transformation and an explicit offer. Those steps need material. A team with no customer evidence yet has nothing to put under transformation, and a thin one reads as filler.
The public evidence for any of these as a structure is mostly practitioner-run tests on single pages. The sources reviewed here include no independent comparison of them for B2B content, so treat the choice as a hypothesis to check against your own results.