Persuasion2020

Persuasion
December 2020
Persuasion
• Generally, the word persuasion refers to the process of influencing
another person’s attitudes, beliefs, values, and/or behaviors.
• An attitude is a tendency to behave in a certain way.
• A belief is a conviction in the existence or reality of something or in
the truth of some assertion.
• A value is an indicator of what you feel is good or bad, ethical or
unethical, just or unjust.
• In the context of persuasion, the word behavior refers to overt,
observable actions such as voting for a particular person,
contributing money to the Red Cross, or buying a hybrid automobile.
Three general goals of persuasive
speaking
1. To strengthen or weaken attitudes, beliefs, or values.
2. To change attitudes, beliefs, or values. Sometimes you’ll want
to change how audience members feel.
3. To motivate to action. Most often your goal is to get people to
do something—for example, to vote for one person rather
than another, to donate money to a fund for the homeless, or
to take a course in personal finance.
The Three Persuasive Proofs
• logical (or logos): logos puts logic into play by using evidence
and facts,
• emotional (or pathos): elicits emotions in the audience, and
• credibility (or ethos): calls upon the ethics, or what we'd call the
values, of the speaker.
Logical Proof
• When a speaker persuades listeners with logical arguments—
focusing on facts and evidence rather than on emotions or credibility
claims—the listeners are more likely to remain persuaded over time
and are more likely to resist counterarguments that may come up in
the future (Petty & Wegener, 1998).
• Logos is the persuasive technique that aims to convince an
audience by using logic and reason. Also called “the logical appeal,”
logos examples in persuasive communication include the citation of
statistics, facts, charts, and graphs.
Logical Proof
Three main categories of logical appeals:
1. Reasoning from Specific Instances and Generalizations
2. Reasoning from Causes and Effects
3. Reasoning from Sign
Emotional Proof
• Emotional appeals (or motivational appeals) are appeals to your listeners’
feelings, needs, desires, and wants and can be powerful means of
persuasion (Wood, 2000).
• Pathos advertisement techniques appeal to the senses, memory,
nostalgia, or shared experience. Pathos examples pull at the heartstrings
and make the audience feel.
• Specifically, when you use emotional appeals, you appeal to those forces
that energize, move, or motivate people to develop, change, or strengthen
their attitudes or ways of behaving. For example, one motive might be the
desire for status. This desire might motivate someone to enter a highstatus occupation or to dress a certain way..
Credibility Proof
• Your credibility is the degree to which your audience regards you as
a believable spokesperson.
• If your listeners see you as competent and knowledgeable, of good
character, and charismatic or dynamic, they will find you credible. As
a result, you’ll be more effective in changing their attitudes or in
moving them to do something. Credibility is not something you have
or don’t have in any objective sense; rather, it’s a function of what
the audience thinks of you.
• Ethos advertisement techniques invoke the superior “character” of a
speaker, presenter, writer, or brand.
Credibility Proof: The elements
• Competence
• Character
• Charisma