Actual Persuasiveness Research Articles

Social media discourse and voting decisions influence: sentiment analysis in tweets during an electoral period

In a time where social media is fundamental for any political campaign and to share a message with an electoral audience, this study searches for a conclusion of the actual persuasion capacity of social media in the electors when they need to decide whom to vote for as their next government. For this, it compares the sentiment that Social Media users demonstrated during an electoral period with the actual results of those elections. For this analysis, it was used, as a case study, tweets mentioning the two major English parties, Conservative and Labor, their respective candidates for the position of prime minister, and terms that identified their political campaign during the electoral period of the General Elections of the United Kingdom that occurred on December 12, 2019. Data were collected using R. The treatment and analysis were done with R and RapidMiner. Results show that tweets’ sentiment is not a reliable election results predictor. Additionally, results also show that it is impossible to state that social media impacts voting decisions. At least not from the polarity of the sentiment of opinions on social media.

Logos and pathos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric . A journey into the role of emotions in rational persuasion in rhetoric

This paper demonstrates that in the context of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the Topics, logos and pathos are not two different ways of arguing. Aristotle highlights the rational nature of persuasion : the reasons that support a claim can be based on the characteristics of things or on what arises emotions in the audience. While Aristotle designed dialectical argumentation focusing on logical rules and endoxa, in the Rhetoric he recognized the major role that emotions play in actual persuasion. Within this framework, the emotional appeal is not an alternative to the rational appeal : it is the outcome of a topical choice and of the strategy of argumentation that an orator intends to use. Ultimately, the quality of the argumentation depends on the morality and the goals of speakers. But for those orators who have the best intentions to benefit society, Aristotle designed a training that empowers them in all that matters to convince an audience.

Message Pretesting Using Assessments of Expected or Perceived Persuasiveness: Evidence About Diagnosticity of Relative Actual Persuasiveness

AbstractDo formative assessments of the expected or perceived effectiveness of persuasive messages provide a good guide to the relative actual effectiveness of those messages? The correlational evidence usually invoked on this question is less than ideal. The most relevant evidence compares two messages’ relative standing on perceived message effectiveness (PME) and actual message effectiveness (AME) as assessed in separate samples. Across 151 such comparisons, the direction of difference in PME matched that of AME in 58% of cases (ns). Diagnostic accuracy did not differ significantly depending on the size or significance of the PME difference, the size of the PME sample, whether PME assessments came from experts or target-audience representatives, the referent of the PME assessment, or whether the PME assessment involved comparing messages.

Статусно-ролевые отношения коммуникантов в ситуациях уговаривания

The speech genre (SG) “persuasion” is investigated on the material of literary-fictitious dialogues in Russian literature. The relevance of the study is determined by the presence of many unresolved issues in the field of the theory of SG, the existence of transitional and hybrid forms of SG, the need to analyze socio-cultural factors of achieving communicative agreement. The novelty of the study is seen in the fact that there is a difference between SG “persuasion” in the narrow sense of the word (as one of the components in the communicative whole of a higher level) and in the broad sense - as a complex dialogical speech macrogenre of everyday communication, including, along with the actual persuasion, imperative statement, primary refusal (one or more) in the response, and the final statement with the final meaning of refusal or consent. Persuasion modelling depends on the initial mandatory subgenre, explicitness / implicitness of optional elements, repeatable structural components, achieving / not achieving illocutionary aims. Special attention is paid to the analysis of sociocultural factors of success / failure of speech actions: status-role relations of communicants, explicit and / or hidden illocutionary goal, the use of emotional and logical verbal means, the inclusion of elements of the related genre of coercion, a set of communicative strategies and tactics.

ВОСПРИЯТИЕ И ФУНКЦИОНИРОВАНИЕ ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИХ МЕДИАПРИЕМОВ В СОЦИАЛЬНЫХ МЕДИА

The purpose of the article is to analyze the political media memes’ functioning, their effects and persuasion, to classify them and to describe their structure. In this study finding authors describe the actual persuasion of media memes in contemporary Russian society. Media memes have got a clear structure via they could spread in social media. This structure also allows to classify media memes for better understanding their functioning and general message, authors rank political media memes illustrating the ones of recent US presidential elections. These units’ successful using as a format of media effect and their replication in media can depend on our ways of persuasion, on neurological and psychological basis of information virality. In a nutshell, political media memes couldn’t be considered as humor units only, but also as a format of media impact, an effective tool of media discourse, propaganda and political agitation during election season.

When political candidates “go positive”: the effects of flattering the rival in political communication

In the field of political communication, the effects of negative propaganda strategies have been long studied. In the current work, I investigated the perceived and actual persuasiveness of an unexplored positive propaganda strategy, i.e., addressing a flattery to the rival in a political speech. In a 2 × 2 full-factorial design experiment, a fictitious candidate (a man or a woman) flattered, or did not flatter, an opponent in a political speech. Results showed that when the candidate flattered a rival s/he influenced the likelihood of being voted through source trustworthiness evaluation, irrespective of the candidate’s gender. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Swearing in Political Discourse

An experimental study investigated the effect of politicians’ profanity and gender on their perceived and actual persuasiveness. Results showed that a candidate’s use of swear words increased the perception of language informality and improved the general impression about the source. The latter effect was particularly strong for male candidate, as female candidate was already evaluated positively, irrespective of her cursing. In addition, though the manipulation of the politician’s vulgarity did not directly affect participants’ self-reported likelihood of voting for him or her, an indirect effect through language informality and impression about the candidate emerged. On the contrary, profanity use reduced perceived persuasiveness of the message, suggesting that the influence of swearing could be automatic and unaware. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Differences in actual persuasiveness between experiential and professional expert evidence

This study investigates the persuasiveness of different types of expert evidence. Following Wagemans (2011), two types of experts were distinguished that can be used in expert evidence: experiential experts (who base their expertise on personal experience) and professional experts (who base their expertise on professional knowledge). In a between-subjects experiment (N = 179), these different types of experts were included in a news report on a political issue. Results indicate that the perceived expertise and persuasiveness of professional experts was higher than that of experiential experts. Perceived expertise completely mediated the effects of the different types of expert evidence on persuasion. These results point towards a recommendation of using professional expert evidence over experiential expert evidence in reporting on political issues.

When consumers cope with price-persuasion knowledge: The role of topic knowledge

We identify the circumstances under which consumers' beliefs about the persuasive intent of alternative pricing formats influence their preferences for offers using those formats. First, we assessed the existence of actual persuasion knowledge for partitioned and inclusive pricing formats. In a second study, we tested hypotheses relating to persuasion knowledge and offer choice. Results indicate that consumers choose offers with the price format they perceive as having less persuasive intent. More important, this effect was stronger when participants were unfamiliar with the target product category, but disappeared when consumers perceived the price as unfair.

Understanding travel promotional narratives: The influence of narrative transportation and skepticism

SupervisorCarla A. SantosInstitution awarding the Ph. D. DegreeUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignDate of defence24th March 2008Goal and objectives of the dissertationAn important challenge for destination management organizations is designing effective methods to create awareness among travelers by means of promoting their travel destination to potential and/or return visitors. In response to this challenge, a growing stream of literature exists which examines travelers' decision-making processes, use of tourism information sources, and general search behavior; the identification of this process illuminates the influential role and overall effectiveness of various travel-related promotional information sources or narratives on travelers' knowledge of and visitation to destinations.However, an examination and understanding of how travelers process promotional travel-related narratives or information sources is lacking in current tourism literature. Moreover, when examined in the context of tourism, promotional narratives have been largely examined by literary and history scholars from a more critical standpoint where, in short, conclusions have often assumed that the narratives examined possess a certain level of persuasive power. Such research lacks a concrete examination and/or measurement of the actual persuasiveness held by the promotional travel narratives examined. In seeking to examine the oft-assumed persuasive power held by promotional travel narratives, this dissertation utilized an online survey format with an embedded experiment and included the adaptation of two established and validated scales: narrative transportation scale (Green and Brock, 2000) and skepticism toward advertising scale (Obermiller and Spangenberg, 1988).The utilization of these scales allowed for an examination of how message cue (travel article, travel brochure, no cue) influenced participants' processing of travel messages; how the format in which promotional travel messages was presented (story versus list) influenced the overall persuasiveness of the information received; how participants skepticism of travel articles and travel brochures compared; how participants skepticism toward travel articles and travel brochures influenced their processing of travel narratives; and, how participants' demographic characteristics influenced their narrative processing and their skepticism of travel articles and travel brochures.MethodologyParticipants were randomly assigned to one of the cells of the 3x2 (Message cue: travel article, advertisement, no cue x Presentation format: story or list) between-subjects factorial design. The dissertation incorporated six surveys; each identical except for message cue given (travel article, travel brochure, no cue) and presentation format (story versus list). The six versions were: 1) Travel article message cue (publicity) with story format; 2) Travel article message cue (advertising) with list format; 3) Travel brochure message cue (publicity) with story format; 4) Travel brochure message cue (advertising) with list format; 5) No message cue with story format; and 6) No message cue with list format. Depending upon the survey received, participants were instructed to read an excerpt taken from either a travel article, a travel brochure or to simply read the excerpt on the next page. Participants were then asked to read an excerpt presented in story format or an excerpt presented in a bulleted list format. The list format was created using the information presented in the narrative excerpt. All participants were asked to answer six questions relating to the Transportation scale, eight SKEP statements relating to travel articles, eight SKEP statements relating to travel brochures, and general demographic-related questions. The total usable data sample from the combined six survey groups consisted of 526 completed surveys.Narrative Transportation Scale: Green and Brock's (2000) Transportation scale was incorporated in order to examine the assumed persuasive power of travel narratives by measuring a narrative's ability to transport readers using both a story format and a list format. …

Comparing the Actual and Expected Persuasiveness of Evidence Types: How Good are Lay People at Selecting Persuasive Evidence?

Whereas there are many publications in which argumentation quality has been defined by argumentation theorists, considerably less research attention has been paid to lay people’s considerations regarding argument quality. Considerations about strong and weak argumentation are relevant because they can be compared with actual persuasive success. Argumentation theorists’ conceptions have to some extent been shown to be compatible with actual effectiveness, but for lay people such compatibility has yet to be determined. This study experimentally investigated lay people’s expectations about the persuasiveness of anecdotal, statistical, causal, and expert evidence, and compared these expectations with the actual persuasiveness of these evidence types. Dutch and French participants (N = 174) ranked four types of evidence in terms of their expected persuasiveness for eight different claims. Both cultural groups expected statistical evidence to be the most persuasive type of evidence to other people, followed by expert, causal, and, finally, anecdotal evidence. A comparison of these rankings with the results of Hornikx and Hoeken (Communication Monographs 74, 443–463, 2007, Study 1) on the actual persuasiveness of the same evidence types reveals that people’s expectations are generally accurate: How relatively persuasive they expect evidence types to be often corresponded with their actual persuasiveness.

Anecdotal, statistical, and causal evidence: Their perceived and actual persuasiveness

Claims about the occurrence of future events play an important role in pragmatic argumentation. Such claims can be supported by inductive arguments employing anecdotal, statistical, or causal evidence. In an experiment, the actual and perceived persuasiveness of these three types of evidence were assessed. A total of 324 participants read a newspaper article in which it was claimed that the building of a cultural centre would be profitable. This claim was supported by either anecdotal, statistical or causal evidence. The statistical evidence proved to be more convincing than the anecdotal and causal evidence. Although the latter two evidence types were equally unconvincing, the anecdotal evidence was perceived as less persuasive than the causal evidence. Therefore, the actual and perceived persuasiveness of the evidence did not correspond. These results partly replicate the results obtained in previous experiments. They also underscore the need to distinguish between the perceived and the actual persuasiveness of an argument.

The Face of Truth

I attempt to explain Plato's choice of dialogue through an analysis of what he regarded as the conditions of knowledge acquisition. I see the main contribution of the paper in exposing the way in which time and pain are, for Plato, conditions of knowledge acquisition. Plato endorsed the “learning through suffering,” or pathei mathos, convention, central to Greek drama, and did so not through theory but through the praxis some of the dialogues employ. This addition of experiential components to the more cognitively oriented definitions of knowledge that Socrates uses complicates what these works may say about human knowledge. I analyze these tensions and the bearing they may have on the question of Plato's choice of dialogue, that is, on his rhetoric in practice. The requirements for actual persuasion, as Plato specifies them in the Seventh Letter,, are only partially met by the fictional scenes of argumentation and knowledge conveying that Plato presents. However, such scenes permit transcending some of the limitations of written, systematic, nonpersonal discourse. The presentation of such interactions to a real reader through dialogue turns into a mode of writing that is closer to meeting the demands of actual communication of knowledge – at least knowledge regarding what Plato envisaged as being the highest sort of epistemic communication

WOMEN SPORTS REPORTERS: HAVE THEY CAUGHT UP?

A sports reporter's perceived competence and actual persuasiveness were examined as a function of reporter's gender, audience member's gender, athletes' gender, and communication medium. Two different sports commentaries were created, concerning men's basketball and women's gymnastics. One of the two commentaries was presented to each respondent, either in the form of a sports magazine column or as a radio sportscast. In the commentary, either a male or a female sports reporter promoted an unlikely winner in NCAA competition. The reporter's perceived competence was significantly influenced by his or her gender: The female reporter was rated less competent than the male. This effect was consistent across male and female respondents, across men's basketball and women's gymnastics, and across print and broadcast media. No differences were observed in the respondents' acceptance of the reporter's projections of a long-shot winner. However, when the commentaries challenging the “consensus” winner (e.g., Duke in basketball) were attributed to a female reporter, compared to a male reporter, respondents adhered more strongly to the consensus team in their own choices of expected winners. Respondents thus resisted the reporter's arguments against the consensus team significantly more if the reporter was female. This effect also was consistent across respondent gender, athlete gender, and medium.