Persuasion


Persuasion or persuasion arts is an umbrella term for influence. Persuasion can influence a person's beliefs, attitudes, intentions, motivations, or behaviours.
Persuasion is studied in many disciplines. Rhetoric studies modes of persuasion in speech and writing and is often taught as a classical subject. Psychology looks at persuasion through the lens of individual behaviour and neuroscience studies the brain activity associated with this behaviour. History and political science are interested in the role of propaganda in shaping historical events. In business, persuasion is aimed at influencing a person's attitude or behaviour towards some event, idea, object, or another person by using written, spoken, or visual methods to convey information, feelings, or reasoning, or a combination thereof. Persuasion is also often used to pursue personal gain, such as election campaigning, giving a sales pitch, or in trial advocacy. Persuasion can also be interpreted as using personal or positional resources to change people.

Forms

is a form of persuasion used to indoctrinate a population towards an individual or a particular agenda.
Coercion is a form of persuasion that uses aggressive threats and the provocation of fear and/or shame to influence a person's behavior.
Systematic persuasion is the process through which attitudes or beliefs are leveraged by appeals to logic and reason.
Heuristic persuasion, on the other hand, is the process through which attitudes or beliefs are leveraged by appeals to habit or emotion.

History and philosophy

The academic study of persuasion began with the Greeks, who emphasized rhetoric and elocution as the highest standard for a successful politician. All trials were held in front of the Assembly, and the likelihood of success of the prosecution versus the defense rested on the persuasiveness of the speaker. Rhetoric is the art of effective persuasive speaking, often through the use of figures of speech, metaphors, and other techniques.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle listed four reasons why one should learn the art of persuasion:
  1. Truth and justice are perfect; thus if a case loses, it is the fault of the speaker.
  2. It is an excellent tool for teaching.
  3. A good rhetorician must be able to argue both sides to understand the whole problem, and
  4. There is no better way to defend one's self.
He described three fundamental ways to communicate persuasively:
  1. Ethos : refers to the effort to convince your audience of your credibility or character. It is not automatic and can be created through actions, deeds, understanding, or expertise by the speaker.
  2. Logos : refers to the effort to convince your audience by using logic and reason. This can be formal and non-formal. Formal reasoning uses syllogisms, arguments where two statements validly imply a third statement. Non-formal reasoning uses enthymemes, arguments that have valid reasoning but are informal and assume the audience has prior knowledge.
  3. Pathos : refers to the effort to persuade your audience by making an appeal to their feelings.

    Ethics of persuasion

Many philosophers have commented on the morality of persuasion. Socrates argued that rhetoric was based on appearances rather than the essence of a matter. Thomas Hobbes was critical of use rhetoric to create controversy, particularly the use of metaphor. Immanuel Kant was critical of rhetoric, arguing that it could cause people to reach conclusions that are at odds with those that they would have reached if they had applied their full judgment. He draws parallels between the function of rhetoric and the deterministic function of the mind like a machine.
Aristotle was critical of persuasion, though argued that judges would often allow themselves to be persuaded by choosing to apply emotions rather than reason. However, he argued that persuasion could be used to induce an individual to apply reason and judgment.
Writers such as William Keith and Christian O. Lundberg argue that uses of force and threats in trying to influence others does not lead to persuasion, but rather talking to people does, going further to add "While Rhetoric certainly has its dark side that deals in tricks and perceptions... the systematic study of rhetoric generally ignores these techniques, in part because they are not very systematic or reliable." There is also in legal disputes, the matter of the burden of proof when bringing up an argument, where it often falls on the hands of the one presenting a case to prove its validity to another person and where presumptions may be made where of the burden of proof has not been met, an argument may be dropped such as in a more famous example of "Innocent until proven guilty", although this line of presumption or burden of proof may not always be followed. While Keith and Lundberg do go into detail about the different intricacies of persuasion, they do explain that lapses in logic and or reasoning could lead to persuasive arguments with faults. These faults can come as enthymemes, where more likely than not only certain audiences with specific pieces of knowledge may understand the reasoning being presented with missing logic, or the more egregious example of fallacies where conclusions may be drawn through invalid argument. In contrast to the reasoning behind enthymemes, the use of examples can help prove a person's rhetorical claims through inductive reasoning, which assumes that "if something is true in specific cases, it is true in general".
Examples can be split into two categories real and hypothetical. Real examples come from personal experience or academic/scientific research which can support the argument you're making. Hypothetical examples are made-up. When arguing something, speakers can put forward a hypothetical situation that illustrates the point they are making to connect better with the audience. These examples must be plausible to properly illustrate a persuasive argument.

Theories

There are many psychological theories for what influences an individual's behaviour in different situations. These theories will have implications about how persuasion works.

Attribution theory

Humans attempt to explain the actions of others through either dispositional attribution or situational attribution.
Dispositional attribution, also referred to as internal attribution, attempts to point to a person's traits, abilities, motives, or dispositions as a cause or explanation for their actions. A citizen criticizing a president by saying the nation is lacking economic progress and health because the president is either lazy or lacking in economic intuition is utilizing a dispositional attribution.
Situational attribution, also referred to as external attribution, attempts to point to the context around the person and factors of his surroundings, particularly things that are completely out of his control. A citizen claiming that a lack of economic progress is not a fault of the president but rather the fact that he inherited a poor economy from the previous president is situational attribution.
A fundamental attribution error occurs when people wrongly attribute either a shortcoming or accomplishment to internal factors while disregarding all external factors. In general, people use dispositional attribution more often than situational attribution when trying to explain or understand the behavior of others. This happens because we focus more on the individual when we lack information about that individual's situation and context. When trying to persuade others to like us or another person, we tend to explain positive behaviors and accomplishments with dispositional attribution and negative behaviors and shortcomings with situational attributions.

Behaviour change theories

The Theory of Planned Behavior is the foremost theory of behaviour change. It has support from meta-analyses which reveals it can predict around 30% of behaviour. Theories, by nature however, prioritize internal validity, over external validity. They are coherent and therefore make for an easily reappropriated story. On the other hand, they will correspond more poorly with the evidence, and mechanics of reality, than a straightforward itemization of the behaviour change interventions by their individual efficacy.
These behaviour change interventions have been categorized by behavioral scientists. A mutually exclusive, comprehensively exhaustive translation of this taxonomy, in decreasing order of effectiveness are:
  1. positive and negative consequences
  2. offering/removing incentives,
  3. offering/removing threats/punishments,
  4. distraction,
  5. changing exposure to cues for the behaviour,
  6. prompts/cues,
  7. goal-setting,
  8. emotional/health/social/environmental/regret consequences,
  9. self-monitoring of the behaviour and outcomes of behaviour,
  10. mental rehearsal of successful performance,
  11. self-talk,
  12. focus on past success,
  13. comparison of outcomes via persuasive argument,
  14. pros/cons and comparative imaging of future outcomes,
  15. identification of self as role model,
  16. self-affirmation,
  17. reframing,
  18. cognitive dissonance,
  19. reattribution,
  20. antecedents
A typical instantiations of these techniques in therapy isexposure / response prevention for OCD.

Conditioning theories

Conditioning plays a huge part in the concept of persuasion. It is more often about leading someone into taking certain actions of their own, rather than giving direct commands. In advertisements for example, this is done by attempting to connect a positive emotion to a brand/product logo. This is often done by creating commercials that make people laugh, using a sexual undertone, inserting uplifting images and/or music etc. and then ending the commercial with a brand/product logo. Great examples of this are professional athletes. They are paid to connect themselves to things that can be directly related to their roles; sport shoes, tennis rackets, golf balls, or completely irrelevant things like soft drinks, popcorn poppers and panty hose. The important thing for the advertiser is to establish a connection to the consumer.
This conditioning is thought to affect how people view certain products, knowing that most purchases are made on the basis of emotion. Just like you sometimes recall a memory from a certain smell or sound, the objective of some ads is solely to bring back certain emotions when you see their logo in your local store. The hope is that repeating the message several times makes consumers more likely to purchase the product because they already connect it with a good emotion and positive experience.
Stefano DellaVigna and Matthew Gentzkow did a comprehensive study on the effects of persuasion in different domains. They discovered that persuasion has little or no effect on advertisement; however, there was a substantial effect of persuasion on voting if there was face-to-face contact.