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Kant’s thoughts on language as a practical tool of what he would call “pragmatic formation” in his pedagogical writings are often overlooked. If anything, Kant is read from selected passages of his third Critique as being opposed to the arts of oratory and persuasion. This chapter will canvas Kant’s supposed animosity to the persuasive employment of language – rhetoric, in a term – and detail the complexity that lies behind Kant’s reaction to language as a tool of action among moral agents. Drawing upon his anthropological lectures and writings, as well as his religious and aesthetics work, I will argue that Kant leaves space in his system for a moralized, and moralizing, use of persuasive language in human community. Language use can draw upon inclinations and desires in an agent, and thereby compromise their autonomy. Yet there are ways that Kant speaks of or hints at that use language in ways that move us to be free. Kant’s aesthetics also allows room for vivid presentations as a way to make clear to one’s listener what one already knows in a nonmanipulative manner; these presentation styles are tied in with Kant’s religious thought, as well as with the western rhetorical tradition in general.
In Tusculans 1 Cicero gives a lengthy rebuttal of the thesis that death is an evil. This raises a puzzle: how can such a one-sided presentation aspire to reveal whether it is more plausible that death is or is not an evil? Invoking the Tusculans’ practical aim – the removal of emotional disturbance – does not fully satisfy, since it is unclear how effective persuasion can be if the contrary position does not receive a fair hearing. I show that as main speaker in the book Cicero warns against over-confidence in embracing positions that one wishes to be true; and I argue that as author Cicero portrays the interlocutor of Tusculans 1 as a salutary example of how not to approach the kind of questions about death with which the work engages. We are encouraged to see the interlocutor’s failure as one not of character but of inexperience in philosophical method.
This chapter consider advertising strategies based on, or inspired by, meme genres. Our most interesting examples don’t so much directly borrow a fully-formed, recognizable meme to reuse it in an ad (though this, too, is sometimes done). Instead, really successful memetically inspired ads partly borrow from existing meme codes, such as when-memes or the ‘Sections of’ meme, and adapt these creatively to suit the persuasive goals identified. This suggests that aspects of the grammar of memes are affecting other forms of communication.
As extreme political views gain popularity and acceptability, the conditions under which media exposure to extreme right views contributes to this process, and strategies to counter media-induced persuasion and normalisation effects remain unclear. Using population-based survey experiments leveraging real-world interviews with extreme right activists on Sky News UK and Australia, we test whether media exposure leads to higher agreement with extreme right statements. We also test whether exposure affects perceptions of how many others agree with these statements. Our findings are consistent across both countries: exposure to uncritical interviews increases agreement with extreme statements and perceptions of broader support in the population. Testing the media strategy in the UK, we find that critical interviewing tarnishes the activist’s image and reduces effects, but still heightens perceived support for extreme statements. This study identifies a mechanism through which extreme political ideas spread and offers insights into media strategies to counteract persuasion and normalisation effects.
Scholars often use survey experiments to evaluate political messages’ persuasive effects, but messages developed in the lab do not always persuade in real-world campaigns. In this research note, we report three experiments on one central obstacle in lab-to-field messaging applications: getting people’s attention. We first analyze a large-scale direct mail campaign run by an established non-profit that promotes conservative solutions to climate change. In this experiment, postcards with messages based on extant survey-experimental research did not cause changes in key climate attitudes. In a follow-up survey experiment, identical postcards induced attitude change— Re but only when participants were required to pay attention to them. A final field experiment highlights the difficulty of inducing attention; in another real-world campaign, postcards with eye-catching scratch-off panels performed no better than standard postcards. These findings illustrate the crucial role of attention and the complexity of translating messages developed in survey experiments into effective real-world campaigns.
What is persuasion and how does it differ from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation? Which persuasive strategies are effective, and which contexts are they effective in? The aim of persuasion is attitude change, but when does a persuasive strategy yield a rational change of attitude? When is it permissible to engage in rational persuasion? In this paper, I address these questions, both in general and with reference to particular examples. The overall aims are (i) to sketch an integrated picture of the psychology, epistemology, and ethics of persuasion and (ii) to argue that there is often a tension between the aim we typically have as would-be persuaders, which is bringing about a rational change of mind, and the ethical constraints which partly distinguish persuasion from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation.
This introduction sets the scene for the rest of the volume by surveying the main areas of existing communicative research on persuasion. Starting with the classic rhetorical approach, we describe the study of persuasive language on the level of microlinguistic features that often occur in discourse types such as politics or advertising. We then summarize the findings of persuasion research in classic pragmatics and discourse analysis, paying attention to such aspects as speaker’s credibility and expertness. We wrap up the discussion by deliberating on the work on malicious persuasion: propaganda, disinformation and misinformation, and the phenomena of filter bubbles and echo chambers. The chapter is concluded with the short outlines of the papers in the volume.
This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the strategic use of negative evaluations in the Twitter campaigns by the Republican and Democratic candidate for the US presidency in 2020. The study combines a corpus-linguistic method (key semantic domain method) with Martin and White’s Appraisal framework to systematically capture and compare the dispersion, frequency and contextual use of negative evaluations by Joe Biden and Donald J. Trump. The study shows how corpus-linguistic methods can be usefully employed to systematize the quantitative and qualitative exploration of attitudinal evaluations in mid-size language corpora. Further, results indicate that Donald Trump’s targets and objects of negative evaluation in 2020 have broadened compared to his previous Twitter election campaign. This is likely to reflect Trump’s new official status as leader of the government, needing to defend his actions and decisions. In turn, Joe Biden’s negative evaluations on Twitter criticise such government policies with the principal aim to present Biden as a challenger of the status quo, fighting to create new jobs for the ‘ordinary man’. This constitutes a clear change in campaign policies of the Democratic party compared to their Twitter campaign for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Traditionally, the role of language in persuasion has been mostly studied in experimental settings with a focus on how persuasive messages are understood, processed, and ultimately complied with. Recently, a new approach has emerged that focuses on the sequential properties of language-in-use mobilised in real-life persuasion-in-interaction (Humă, 2023). This body of research illuminates how aspects of sequence organisation (Humă et al., 2019, 2020), turn design (Llewellyn, 2015), and lexical choice (Sikveland & Stokoe, 2016, 2020) are implicated in persuasion. The present study contributes to this line of work by zooming in on two configurations for formatting requests in sales interactions: when-formulated and if-formulated sales requests. Using conversation analysis to examine a corpus of 159 real-life telephone calls between salespeople and prospective customers, I show that the former configuration is more effective in eliciting productive responses that advance the commercial activity. These findings can be explained in terms of the differential opportunities afforded by the two configurations to reject the sales requests. Thus, this study strengthens the claim that, in real-life social interaction, persuasion is mainly realised through the architecture of possibilities for responsive action and not through the effects of language-in-use on individual minds.
The use of the English language in many countries around the world greatly facilitates international communication. However, linguists have long pointed out that differences between established and emerging dialects of English may lead to miscommunication, especially because many users of the language may not be aware of many of these differences. Such issues may be particularly acute in high-stakes communicative endeavours such as persuading others to change their opinion or engage in a certain action. Psychologists have previously explored this construct mainly in experimental settings, whereas the present chapter uses a large database (‘corpus’) of natural language. The chapter thus provides an empirical, corpus-based analysis of the linguistic expression of persuasion across 21 international dialects (‘varieties’) of English from countries where English is widely used as a first or second language. Results indicate that there are substantial differences in the degree of overt expression of persuasion, with South Asian varieties of English indicating the lowest levels and (West) African varieties that greatest level of overt persuasion. The chapter concludes by discussing possible explanations of these patterns, implications for international communication as well as avenues for more detailed analyses of particular linguistic features involved in persuasion.
Populist rhetoric – presenting arguments in people-centric, anti-elite and ‘good v. evil’ frames – is said to provide populist parties and candidates with an advantage in electoral competition. Yet, identifying the causal effect of populist rhetoric is complicated by its enmeshment with certain positions and issues. We implement a survey experiment in the UK (n≈9,000), in which hypothetical candidates with unknown policy positions randomly make (non-)populist arguments, taking different positions on various issues. Our findings show that, on average, populist arguments have a negative effect on voters’ evaluations of the candidate profiles and no effect on voters’ issue preferences. However, populist arguments sway voters’ issue preferences when made by a candidate profile that voters are inclined to support. Among voters with strong populist attitudes, populist arguments also do not dampen candidates’ electoral viability. These findings suggest that populist rhetoric is useful in convincing and mobilizing supporters but detrimental in expanding electoral support.
In recent years, experimental economics has seen a rise in the collection and analysis of choice-process data, such as team communication transcripts. The main purpose of this paper is to understand whether the collection of team communication data influences how individuals reason and behave as they enter the team deliberation process, i.e. before any communication exchange. Such an influence would imply that team setups have limited validity to speak to individual reasoning processes. Our treatment manipulations allow us to isolate the effects of (1) belonging to a team, (2) actively suggesting an action to the team partner, and (3) justifying the suggestion in a written text to the team partner. Across three different tasks, we find no systematic evidence of changed suggestions and altered individual sophistication due to changes in aspects (1)–(3) of our experimental design. We thus find no threat to said validity of team setups. In addition to investigating how the team setup affects individual behavior before communication, we also investigate the sophistication of decisions after the communication. We find that sophisticated strategies are more persuasive than unsophisticated strategies, especially when communication includes written justifications, thereby explaining why teams are more sophisticated and proving rich communication to be fruitful.
We aim to test the hypothesis that overconfidence arises as a strategy to influence others in social interactions. To address this question, we design an experiment in which participants are incentivized either to form accurate beliefs about their performance at a test, or to convince a group of other participants that they performed well. We also vary participants’ ability to gather information about their performance. Our results show that participants are more likely to (1) overestimate their performance when they anticipate that they will try to persuade others and (2) bias their information search in a manner conducive to receiving more positive feedback, when given the chance to do so. In addition, we also find suggestive evidence that this increase in confidence has a positive effect on participants’ persuasiveness.
The historian’s task is to narrate, but he must also win credibility for that narrative: his task is therefore also to persuade his audience that he is the proper person to tell the story and, moreover, that his account is one that should be believed. In his capacity as persuader, the historian will often try to shape the audience’s perception of his character and to use this as an additional claim to authority; indeed, among the Roman historians, where explicit professions of research are rarer than with the Greeks, the shaping of the narrator’s character takes on a correspondingly larger role. But most of the historians, Greek and Roman, try to shape their audience’s perception of their character. Nor is this surprising when we consider the teachings of rhetoric.
Although I have regularly cited Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography in the twenty-five years or so since it appeared, it is only with the current reissue of the work that I have gone back and read it through from beginning to end. About ten years after it was published, I gave serious thought to writing a revised version, both to incorporate much material that I had left out of the original and also (naturally) to update it in the light of more recent scholarship. In the end, I decided not to do so, mostly from the belief that scholarship is an ongoing conversation, and that a work, once published, becomes part of that conversation, dependent on its time and context. Authority and Tradition appeared at a particular point in the discussion of the nature of Greco-Roman historiography, when the linguistic and literary turn was becoming more and more prominent, and the book reflects that moment.
In this chapter the final two dimensions of the TLC are analysed. The four discourse unit functions within those dimensions are once again approached via prototypical discourse units, and task, level of examination and grade of exam are considered as potential sources of variation. Importantly, Narrative emerges in this chapter as a function at the macro-structural level. The analyses show variation by task, level of exam and attainment, and show clearly how the scaffolding behaviour of the examiner influences the selection of micro-structural discourse functions that have an impact on the macro-structural functions present. The chapter argues for the salience of the cooperative principle from Gricean pragmatics as a key organising principle in the discourse observed.
Unlike many core human rights treaties, the Statelessness Conventions are among the most poorly ratified in the world. Orthodox scholarship on human rights treaties primarily focuses on post-ratification implementation and their impact on state conduct. While it is important to examine post-ratification compliance, understanding why states agree to ratify human rights treaties is as crucial. Ratification nudges states towards better human rights practices and serves as a gateway for the implementation of international norms. This chapter addresses this gap in scholarship by examining the ratification status of the Statelessness Conventions and the ratification process of the 1954 Statelessness Convention, together with key actors and their influence, by the Philippines, Southeast Asia’s first State Party to the treaty, and its subsequent accession to the 1961 Reduction of Statelessness Convention. Both rationalist and non-rationalist explanations account for ratifications. While rational explanations push states to ratify treaties, socializing liberal and constructivist-oriented explanations, for example, also drive states to commit to treaties. Multi-dimensional and multi-perspectival orientations should therefore inform how and why ratification or accession campaigns should be undertaken, and perhaps, even how treaties themselves should be designed. This analysis serves as a basis for broader theoretical reflections on persuading states to ratify human rights treaties.
Being able to communicate persuasively is a key skill you need to master to be an effective professional communicator. Many messages we create or receive have some persuasive element – we regularly communicate with the intention of getting others (and sometimes ourselves) to act in a certain way, or change or reinforce behaviours, attitudes and beliefs. Effective persuasion centres on your relationship with your audience, and their willingness to be persuaded. While those in leadership positions can sometimes use their authority to make people act, most business professionals will need to create motives for people to act or believe in their reasoning.
Effective persuasion can have a dramatic influence on the success, effectiveness, and achievement of objectives for organisations.
In this chapter we explore theories and strategies for professional persuasion. You will use your knowledge of your primary and secondary audiences as a means of engaging in successful communication understand where the audience fits in the persuasive communication process, and how the audience’s motivations and knowledge can help shape messages so they are acted on as intended.
In this chapter, we outline examples of two common forms of business writing in a contemporary business context: informative writing and persuasive writing. While there are many forms of informative writing (such as media articles, descriptive essays, manuals and reports), the chapter focuses on one important business genre, reports. Similarly, while there are many forms of persuasive writing (such as advertising, proposals, letters of application and professional tenders), we’ve selected proposals (a specific report format) as an example of persuasive writing. Finally, in the Extend your understanding section, we briefly explore eight key writing strategies and techniques that will enable you to write with more confidence and effectiveness. Of course, many of these can be used outside the business context in your personal life to craft better messages to achieve your goals.
Hume’s ‘Of Eloquence’ – in which Hume implores English orators to imitate the sublime style of Demosthenes – has long puzzled readers, for two reasons. First, it is rare for Hume to present ancient examples as suitable for moderns to imitate, particularly where politics is concerned. Second, in the essay’s conclusion, Hume seems to backtrack by encouraging English speakers to give up on sublimity and introduce more order and method into their speeches instead, inviting the accusation of incoherence. In this chapter, I show how reading Hume’s essay through the lens of ancients and moderns is limiting and that a comparison between the political cultures of England and France was central to his analysis. For Hume, the lack of sublimity in Parliament was a specifically English problem with roots in the English national character. If the revival of classical eloquence that Hume desired looked unlikely to him, I argue, this was due less to the unsuitability of sublime speech to a modern society than to the peculiar place of Parliament in Britain’s mixed constitutional order. I also demonstrate that Hume’s closing call for more order and method in English speechmaking was consistent with his earlier endorsement of the sublime.