concept persuasion

Persuasion

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Definition

Persuasion as a phenomenon, “the act of addressing arguments or appeals to a person in order to induce cooperation, submission, or agreement,” (Oxford English Dictionary Online) has a long history. Its early manifestations include the Biblical prophet Jeremiah’s efforts in the Old Testament to convince his people to repent and establish a connection with God, using a form of persuasive speech from which rhetoricians derive the “Jeremiad” genre. Predating today’s teaching assistants of public speaking classes and political spin doctors were ancient Greece’s Sophists and Italy’s Niccolo Machiavelli, who advised how best to capture attention and power through political eloquence (Perloff, 2008, p 5). In the early nineteenth century, persuasion was key in the United States’ first health campaigns led by reformers concerned about excessive alcoholism and poor diets (Engs, 2000).

Persuasion as an intellectual concept has a similarly lengthy record, reaching back to its roots in the study of rhetoric. Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric saw persuasion as the ultimate purpose of rhetoric, defining rhetoric as “the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever” (Aristotle, bk I, sec.II.2) while Cicero defined an orator’s duty as being to “speak in a style fitted to convince” (Cicero, bk I, sec XXXI.138). Later scholars added to the link between persuasion and rhetoric, with Kenneth Burke’s discussion in A Rhetoric of Motives of “pure persuasion” and the need for speakers to persuade audiences by identifying their causes with those of the audience (Burke, 1969, p 55).

Like rhetoric, numerous definitions abound about persuasion, including the one provided in the opening sentence of this entry. The long history of this concept has given rise to debates attempting to delineate what precisely persuasion is and is not. Nevertheless, despite their variety and complexity, common themes emerge when discussing persuasion: that persuasion entails some form of appeal to an audience to alter their beliefs, and persuasion’s validity as an alternative to force.

Persuasion and Appeal

The word “persuade” comes from the Latin word suadere, meaning “to advise or make something pleasant to.” Suadere itself comes from the same Latin roots as suavis (“suavity”) and swadwis, meaning “sweet” (Oxford English Dictionary Online). Persuasion is thus the act of making an idea or action sweet or pleasurable in order to appeal to audiences and induce them to change their beliefs. Hesiod’s Theogony describes that to honor a king, Zeus’ daughters would “pour sweet dew upon his tongue, and from his mouth there flow[ed] gentle words” (Buxton, 1982, p 7). The sweet, even alluring roots of persuasive communication underline the seductive quality of persuasion, personified for Roman and Greek rhetoricians by Suadela or Peitho, respectively, the goddess of persuasion whose particular province was the alluring power of sexual love (Buxton, 1982, p 31). The relationship between persuasion and desire was strong in Greek culture. Peitho was often cast as a handmaiden of Aphrodite, or, as Rhetorica, adorning Pandora with garlands and flowers, a literal seduction akin to the adornment of speech with stylistic elements that made it more attractive (North, 1993, p 408).

Persuasion –like seduction– seeks to make another party yield, indicating that the act of persuasion implies the presence of some kind of “agonistic” or competitive stress (Burke, 1969, p 52) to be overcome. Kenneth Burke argued that “persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man only insofar as he is free – only insofar as men are potentially free, must the spellbinder seek to persuade

them (Burke, 1969, p 50).” Hence, the competition or adversary to be countered is the free will of the listener, who may choose to agree with a persuader, or not.

Persuasion as Alternative to Force

Given its root in sweetness and appeal, persuasion is often thought of as an alternative to more forceful means of getting one’s way – that persuasion seeks to win people over, where coercion would seek to defeat them. Persuasion was particularly important as a non-violent way of winning over senators and colleagues in the early days of the Roman senate, with rhetoric and persuasiveness playing a vital role in public debate and democratic rule.

However, the distinction between persuasion and its less alluring cousin, coercion, is not always clear. The Sophist, Gorgias, compared the effect of speech on the mind with the powerful domination exercised by drugs on the body, saying that “Speech is a powerful master and achieves the most divine feats with the smallest and least evident body (Gorgias, 2001, p 31).” In a similar blurring of the boundary between verbal coaxing and physical intimidation, Burke spoke of Cicero likening the rhetorical devices in De Oratore to weapons be used either for threat and attack or brandished for show (Burke, 1969, p 68).

The Greek word Peithananke referred to “compulsion made under the guise of persuasion,” (Burke, 1969, p 50) suggesting that persuasion and coercion exist on a spectrum. On one end is sweet alluring appeal, persuasion; on the other is forceful, threatening compulsion, or coercion. In between lie gradations such as coercivepersuasion and persuasive coercion. The point is that persuasion and coercion are not separate concepts, because speech acts can be both appealing and threatening - they differ in degree rather than in purpose because they share a common purpose of seeking to change or sway attitudes. Persuasion seeks to sway attitudes by making audiences an offer while coercion makes them an offer that cannot be refused. In 1982, Mary J. Smith proposed a relativist perspective postulating that the difference between persuasion and coercion was a matter of individual perception, leaving it to an audience or to circumstances to decide whether to classify a speech as persuasive or coercive (Smith, 1982).

Persuasion in Disciplinary History

Although it had its academic roots in rhetoric, the study of persuasion took on a greater empirical focus in the interwar period. Carefully designed and honeyed words of sweet persuasion raised ethical questions such as whether persuasion distracted audiences from genuine substance and blinded them to the truth of a situation. As such, the study of persuasion has taken on increasing importance in communication sub-fields such as propaganda, marketing, subliminal messaging, and political campaigning, in which audiences are asked to sway their preferences towards a particular person or product.

Between the years 1918 to 2009, the word “persuasion” appeared in the titles of approximately 89 articles published by the Quarterly Journal of Speech (Table 1). Earlier articles featured persuasion as a tool of logic, reasoning, and speech education, articles after 1930 sought to theorize persuasive processes and quantify their social effects, and post World War 2 articles discussed persuasion alongside propaganda, political leadership and brainwashing. Scholarship since the 1980s has focused on persuasion’s role in advertising, cognition, propaganda, and identity.

An Open Resource Created by the Graduate Students of the Department of Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign