Abstract
We will first try to place persuasion in the general context of social influence, suggest a definition of persuasion, and discuss its implications in terms of the basic principles of any persuasive attempt. Our model takes the persuader’s perspective, thus focusing on their theory of the recipient’s mind, and their planning for influencing the recipient. We will address persuasion strategies, focusing on the distinction between emotional and non-emotional ones. Once the basic relationships existing between emotions and goals, which are at the foundation of emotional persuasion, are outlined, we will present two general kinds of emotional strategies, persuasion through appeal to expected emotions and persuasion through arousal of emotions, and illustrate the typical features of each kind. Special attention will be paid to persuasion through arousal of emotions, to some problems it raises, and in particular – by focusing on the arousal of two “germane” emotions, envy and emulation – to the analysis of the persuader’s reasoning and planning implied by this strategy. Finally, we will briefly compare our model with the dual-process theories of persuasion and provide some concluding remarks on the specificity of our approach, as well as on possible directions of research on persuasion.
†Fiorella de Rosis is deceased
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth specifying that communication is by no means restricted to verbal messages. In fact, there are innumerable instances of non-verbal communication. For example, by ostensively taking an umbrella while looking at you before going outdoors, I am making you believe not only that it is raining (or going to rain), but also my goal of making you believe it. We view such cases as instances of communication proper.
- 2.
It might seem that, precisely for this reason, the principle of goal hooking does not apply to persuasion through arousal of emotion. In fact, if the motivating goal (in our example, the goal that John suffers some harm) of R’s behavior is directly generated by the emotion aroused (in our example, envy), one might conclude that P is not acting on a pre-existing goal of R. Strictly speaking, this conclusion is correct. However, it is also true that such goal is “hardwired” in the emotion itself. So, by arousing the emotion, P is planning a more sophisticated goal hooking: that between the goal hardwired in the emotion (and in this sense, “pre-existing”) and a possible intention p (for instance, in our example, the intention to damage John).
- 3.
Not all the steps of the mental process are represented in this figure; in particular, when several cognitive items contribute to “produce” another item, we do not specify the causal relationships between the producing items. For instance, while representing the activation of the sense of inferiority, we omit the step of “comparison between E and A.” We believe such simplifications to be reasonable, considering that we wish to employ this model to simulate the process of persuasion strategy selection; however, we are aware that it might reduce the possibility of repairing failed strategies.
- 4.
It is worth specifying that, strictly speaking, the external attribution bias, being common to the majority of people, cannot be considered a personality trait. However, self-defensive people, and particularly those with a “projective” personality, are indeed characterized by a much greater proneness to such a self-serving bias (e.g., Kaney and Bentall, 1992).
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Miceli, M., de Rosis†, F., Poggi, I. (2011). Emotion in Persuasion from a Persuader’s Perspective: A True Marriage Between Cognition and Affect. In: Cowie, R., Pelachaud, C., Petta, P. (eds) Emotion-Oriented Systems. Cognitive Technologies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15184-2_28
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