MediaSpace Wiki

Public Speaking Spr2010 S21

Persuasion

• Fundamentally concerned with changing beliefs, attitudes, and behavior
  • Note the key word is change
    • That means voluntary change
    • Not coercion
  • That can be easy to do when people don't have strongly held views
  • But its pretty hard to do when people do have strongly held views
    • Unfortunately, this is the more common circumstance
    • The good news is that we know a few tricks that can help
    • The bad news is that the other side generally knows them too
      • and they may not have the same sense of ethical fair play that I will teach you here
    • That generally means that persuasion is a war in which a single speech is rarely more than a skirmish
• When we give a persuasive speech
  • We generally have a specific goal of convincing or actuating
  • that may be direct or indirect
  • but which is always specifically targeted to an audience
    • this means analyzing your audience
    • understanding where they already stand
    • and building a speech that adapts to where that audience already stands
      • consider what the audience believes
      • consider what is in the audiences interests
      • take an incremental approach
        • don't even try to bring a hostile audience completely over to your position
  • and which depends on our credibility
  • and our ability t o build arguments with common ground, solid evidence, and careful reasoning
• Social judgment theory can be useful in analyzing your audience
  • It posits that people make decisions relative to what they already believe
    • there are things that people already accept
    • there are things that people already reject
    • there are things about which they are non-committal

Latitudes of
Acceptance	Non-Commitment	Rejection

• For any given position on any given issue, there are things we want people to accept and reject
• It is generally easiest to change peoples views about the things they are non-committal
• This is where the difference between convincing and actuating becomes important
• When people make decisions, they generally use only a subset of their beliefs in making that decision
  • generally capable of juggling 5-7 ideas at once
  • usually consider less
• This is where the difference between convincing and actuating is important
  • Convincing is making an idea so compelling that it becomes one of the things people consider
    • Getting somebody to believe something
  • Actuating is getting them to make a decision based on a set of ideas
    • Getting somebody to take a particular action
• We generally push three kinds of ideas in persuasive speeches
  • Propositions of fact: is a particular idea true or false
  • Propositions of value: is something good or bad
  • Propositions of policy: a particular action should be taken
  • We generally focus on creating or changing perceptions of fact or value when we are convincing someone
  • We generally use accepted facts and values when actuating people to a particular policy