The Persuasive Speech
Ch. 24 Continued
Classic Persuasive Appeals: Using
Proofs
• Pathos: Proof by Emotion
– Aristotle taught that successful public speakers identify
and appeal to four sets of emotions in their listeners.
– Including: anger/meekness, love/hatred, fear/boldness,
shame/shamelessness.
– You can evoke these emotions in a speech by using vivid
descriptions and emotionally charged words.
– Pathos functions as a means to persuasion not by any
persuasive power inherent in emotions, but by the
interplay of emotions-or desire- and sound reasoning.
– Relying solely on emotion as a means to persuasion will fail
most of the time.
– Emotion gets the audience’s attention and stimulates a
desire to act on the emotion; reason is then presented as
justification for the action.
Classic Persuasive Appeals: Using
Proofs
• Ethos: Proof Through Speaker Character
– Aristotle believed that speechmaking should
emphasize the quality and impact of ideas, but he
recognized that the nature of the speaker’s
character and personality also plays an important
role in how well the audience listens to and
accepts the message.
– Ethos= moral character
– Based on three elements: good sense
(competence), moral character, goodwill.
Contemporary Persuasive Appeals:
Needs and Motivations
• Classic Theories of Persuasion describe how
appeals to reasoning, emotion, and speaker
credibility can bring the audience to the speaker’s
point of view.
• Persuasive theories suggest that for persuasion to
succeed, the message must effectively target
(1)audience member’ needs (2) their underlying
motivations for feeling and acting as they do (3)
their likely approach to mentally processing the
persuasive message.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
• In the 1950’s, Abraham Maslow maintained that each
person has a set of basic needs ranging from the
essential, life sustaining ones to the less critical, selfimprovement ones.
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has long been a basis for
motivation-oriented persuasive speeches. The principle
behind the model is that people are motivated to act
on the basis of their needs; thus to persuade listeners
to adopt suggested changes in attitudes, beliefs, or
behavior, point to a need they want fulfilled and then
give them a way to fulfill it.
• The theory points to the fact that successful appeals
depend on trying to understand what motivates the
audience.
Persuading Listeners by Appealing to
the Reasons for their Behavior
• According to expectancy-outcome values theory,
each of us consciously evaluates the potential
costs and benefits (or value) associated with
taking a particular action. We then consider our
attitudes about the behavior in question as well
as what other people who are important to us
might think about the behavior. What we decide
will be the expected outcomes become our
rationale for acting in a certain way.
• Thus when you want to persuade listeners to
change their behavior, try to identify these
expected outcomes through audience analysis
and use them to appeal to your audience.
Persuading Listeners By Focusing on
What’s most Relevant to Them
• According to elaboration Likelihood model of
persuasion (ELM), each of us mentally process
persuasive messages by one of two routes, depending
on the degree of our involvement in the message. The
2 types of processing include: central processing and
peripheral process.
• Central Processing- when we are motivated and able to
think critically about the content of a message.
• Peripheral Processing- When we lack the motivation
(or the ability) to pay close attention to the issues.
• Three Principles of ELM include: message relevance,
appropriate level of understanding, establish
credibility.
Persuading Listeners Through Speaker
Credibility
• Three Factors of Speaker Credibility: expertise,
trustworthiness, speaker similarity.
• When audience members perceive the speaker as
someone who has expertise, they are more likely
persuaded.
• Audiences want more than information and
arguments; they want what’s relevant to them
from someone who cares.
• Speaker Similarity involves listeners’ perceptions
of how similar the speaker is to themselves,
especially in terms of attitudes and moral
character.