Theories of Persuasion

Overview

Persuasion is the attempt to change another person's or group's ideas, attitudes, beliefs, values, or behaviors. Persuasion occurs through arguments, some directly expressed and others made indirectly. The way humans persuade one another has been studied throughout history, and different cultures have found that different types of persuasion are most efficient for their communities. Scholars of persuasion focus on the way that humans are persuaded by textual, oral, and visual arguments. While the same theories apply to each form of argument, their application and study of persuasion are different for each form.

Aristotle suggested that there were three modes of persuasion: pathos, ethos, and logos. He referred to these as "artistic proofs" because they are used to prove that an argument is true. Each of these artistic proofs is present in all attempts at persuasion, though some elements are stronger than others in specific arguments. Therefore, communications scholars frequently study each separately. Pathos is an appeal to emotions, such as attempting to persuade an audience member to change their behavior through a sad story or an uplifting anecdote.

Pathos also occurs when the speaker creates an emotional attachment with the person they are attempting to persuade. This is what children attempt to do when they cry to get a new toy. Pathos is also at work when a motivational speaker encourages audience members to stop smoking, when a dictator is able to secure loyalty to the state, and any time that human emotions such as love, fear, and sadness play a role in an argument.

Ethos is an appeal to the quality of the speaker's character. This includes presenting a speaker as an expert on a subject, a moral authority, or an otherwise trustworthy figure. Ethos is established by the way a speaker speaks, the clothing they wear, and the types of employment they hold. This is evident in a public speech where an audience might receive a well-dressed and well-spoken individual in one way and a poorly dressed and inarticulate speaker in another way. Even if both speakers were presenting the same argument and using the exact same words, the well-dressed and well-spoken speaker would have greater ethos and most likely be more persuasive than the poorly dressed and inarticulate speaker.

Logos refers to the logical construction of the speaker's arguments. When a speaker clearly lays out all of the parts of an argument, it is easy for an audience to understand what is occurring, what the speaker is trying to say, and why they should believe the speaker's argument. Alternatively, when a speaker jumps around in an argument, providing information without a clear structure, the audience is confused and therefore not persuaded. Communications scholars continue to use Aristotle's three terms, pathos, ethos, and logos, when they discuss the ways that persuasion occurs.

Throughout history, scholars have worked to advance this study of persuasion, providing theories about the best way to advance one's goals by encouraging an audience to think or behave differently. These studies originally focused on the use of oral arguments because those were the most commonly used in communities where not everyone could read and write. Then, as literacy became more common, scholars began to consider the role of written arguments as a method to persuade an audience. Modern scholars have also examined visual arguments as tools of persuasion and have asked if images presented alone without text can persuade.

The study of persuasion is undertaken by scholars in communications as well as those working in fields such as psychology who are interested in how and why individuals choose to talk about specific subjects (Berger, 2014). Linguists are also interested in how arguments are made and presented across multiple languages, often requiring specific uses of grammar and vocabulary to convey the speaker's seriousness and intention. Marketing professionals are also interested in persuasion to understand why certain goods sell, and others are left on store shelves. Health professionals are concerned with the best ways to persuade patients to make healthy lifestyle decisions (Shen, Sheer & Li, 2015). Each academic field has a different set of terms in which they analyze persuasion, but the goals of determining why humans make specific decisions and learning how to manipulate those decisions remain the same (Petty, 2018).

Communications scholars are very specific about the types of persuasion that they study, providing tools to break down an argument and then study its parts. The first division that modern communications scholars make when studying persuasion, which differentiates between types of arguments, was proposed by Daniel J. O'Keefe in 1977. Argument 1 is a thing that is made, such as when a politician argues that a policy is wrong. Argument 2 is an event that people have, such as when a couple has a disagreement about purchasing decisions. Many theories of persuasion focus on Argument 1, which typically has a good balance of pathos, ethos, and logos, whereas Argument 2 is sometimes overtaken by pathos. O'Keefe's theories have continued to help scholars think through how persuasion works in modern contexts and how they have been adapted to explain new media. For example, O'Keefe advanced his own study to examine what happens when a speaker expects to persuade an audience but fails to do so.

After communications scholars have determined what form of argument is being addressed, they assess the type of logic that is used during persuasion. Aristotle divided argumentative construction into a syllogism and an enthymeme. Syllogisms are used when a speaker provides all the necessary pieces of information to make an argument. An enthymeme is used when a piece of necessary information is missing. The classic example of a syllogism is: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. This is a syllogism because it lays out the necessary parts of the argument. An enthymeme omits one of the critical parts of the argument; for example, an enthymeme could be that all men are mortal, therefore Socrates is mortal. Or it might be even shorter, simply saying that Socrates is mortal.

An enthymeme makes an effective argument because it calls on information that the audience already knows and can use. The audience that hears "Socrates is mortal" already knows that Socrates is a man, and that all men or mortal. They might even be insulted if the speaker told them these basic things that they already knew (thereby lowering the speaker's ethos). Using an enthymeme, the speaker asks the audience to fill in these parts of the argument. They therefore feel smarter, are engaged in the argument, and are better persuaded by it.

Some contemporary scholars have asked if enthymemes can be used incorrectly or problematically. For example, Fredal (2018) examined the ways enthymemes were used in ancient Greek speeches and might be seen as unreliable arguments because the speaker cannot control how the audience interprets the argument. Looking at these ancient Greek examples allows scholars to examine an argument for which they likely have little emotional attachment, and for which they can assess the outcome. Then, by understanding how these ancient arguments work, scholars can better understand and explain contemporary debates and arguments.

Many communication scholars have followed this method of examining historical arguments to better understand the present. For example, Macagno and Walton (2015) have analyzed the transition between ancient Greek argumentative studies and those that occurred in the Middle Ages. This type of study helps communications scholars to better understand contemporary acts of persuasion, as well as helps historians to better interpret and analyze traditional texts.

Scholars have also debated what to do about persuasion that occurs nonverbally. For example, raising a fist as a threat to fight is a very persuasive way to get someone to stop talking, but the question is how it can be studied by scholars. Mehrabian (2017) argues that it is these types of persuasion, which occur without words, that are potentially most meaningful and enlightening, especially because they are displayed by disenfranchised communities that cannot or are not permitted to speak in public settings. Therefore, communications scholars are working to find a common way to code, or take notes about, these nonverbal persuasion methods so that they can make cross-cultural comparisons. They can also then use recordings such as films that show these nonverbal persuasive gestures and mark the way that they have changed over time.

Further Insights

Beyond the study of ancient arguments and the assessment of non-verbal arguments, communication scholars have devised new ways to study persuasion. One of the most common methods is the "elaboration likelihood model," sometimes abbreviated as ELM. This model of persuasion examines how an audience member is persuaded to change their behavior by fully understanding the outcomes of their current activities. For example, to get someone to stop smoking tobacco, a speaker using ELM would describe in great detail the harm that can be done to the person's body, community, and family. They might go into gruesome detail, showing images of patients with cancer, explaining how their children will grow up without them present, or discussing the ways that they will be ostracized and uninvited from social activities. The speaker will seek to provide so many details that the listener cannot forget the speech and will think about these consequences every time they want to smoke. ELM will then be successful if the listener stops smoking or at least smokes less. Similarly, many governments use a nonverbal, pictorial version of ELM when they require that tobacco companies put pictures of lungs damaged by cigarette smoke on packets of tobacco. These images provide a nonverbal, yet still persuasive, argument of what will happen if someone smokes tobacco.

A second common model of persuasion is the "rational model." In this model of persuasion, the speaker addresses the audience's beliefs, attitudes, values, and motives regarding a particular action. The speaker must act as if the audiences' beliefs and values are creditable—even if they do not agree. So if the audience is full of members of a particular political group, the speaker must respect that political group and should not say anything negative about the political group when attempting to persuade the group to act in a new way. For example, the speaker might acknowledge that the audience supports a political group because that group seems to support their own values. However, the speaker will argue, those values could be better protected and supported if the audience were to change to a new political group. In this persuasive method, the speaker first acknowledges the reasons why the audience members have made a particular decision and then appeals to their sense of rationality and incentivizes them to act in a new way, not because it is better for the speaker but because it is better for the audience members.

The rational model is used by speakers who are attempting to cause a change in attitudes and values. In some ways, this change is different than simply changing a behavior. Put another way, in the ELM example, the speaker was attempting to get a smoker to stop smoking. It is likely that both the speaker and audience in that example hold similar values regarding a clean environment or the care of children by non-smoking parents. Therefore, the speaker already has strong logos and pathos with the audience, and just needs to provide an argument to change a behavior. Whereas in the second example, the speaker must establish their logos and ethos with the audience by indicating that they agree with or understand where the audience is coming from, and that by agreeing to a new value, the audience is likely to have a brighter future.

These are only two of many attempts by communications scholars to define and understand how speakers seek to persuade large and small audiences. As new communities emerge, new media make different forms of argument possible, and society continues to change, communications scholars will need to work to understand the ways that persuasion occurs in everyday speech and activity.

Issues

One challenge for communications scholars is the need to adapt to new forms of persuasion. For example, when memes occurred on social media platforms, scholars rushed to understand the phenomenon and asked how these new images and words functioned as persuasive tools. Additionally, communication scholars are interested in how young people engage in persuasion. For example, Zarouali, Poels, Walrave, and Ponnet (2018) have studied the ways that young people between 14 and 16 years old respond to social advertising. They ask how online discussions affect young people's perceptions of goods and services, and how those discussions affect the persuasiveness of advertisements.

Another difficult task is to get audiences to change their minds and overcome their prejudices. Wojcieszak and Kim (2016) have studied this problem by asking if people are more likely to change their minds about illegal immigrants or same-sex marriage if they are presented with narrative arguments or with numerical evidence. They found that narratives were more successful, which is an outcome that could be expected through the study of Aristotle's artistic proofs. Narratives allow for the development of pathos, ethos, and logos. While the use of numerical evidence, while highly logical (logos) and useful to establish a speaker's credibility (ethos), does not easily form an emotional connection (pathos). In a similar experiment, Wirz (2018) asked if it was possible to change opinions through political advertising that used emotional as opposed to logical appeals. This study found that emotional appeals were indeed successful in populist campaigns, but not as successful in non-populist campaigns. These studies demonstrate the ways that communication scholars are continuing to examine the ways that persuasion occurs in multiple settings, as well as how historical studies, such as those by Aristotle, continue to inform the field of communications.

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