Emotion in Persuasion from a Persuader’s Perspective: A True Marriage Between Cognition and Affect

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.

Are you convinced? A Wizard of Oz study to test emotional vs. rational persuasion strategies in dialogues

“…Persuasion strategies Miceli, de Rosis, and Poggi (2011) define persuasion as "an agent P's intention to modify, through communication, R's beliefs or their strength, as a means for P's superordinate goal to have R freely generate, activate or increase the strength of a certain goal q and, as a consequence, to generate an intention p instrumental to q, and possibly to have R pursue p; but the minimal condition is that R has that intention." In other words, persuasion can be defined as one's intention to modify another's beliefs through communication, and possibly to cause one to modify their behaviors in pursuit of this goal.…”

The role of emotions in inter-action selection

“…In order to persuade it is necessary, among other things, to induce or evoke affective states (whether moods, sentiments or emotions). Although effective non-emotional verbal persuasion techniques certainly exist, non-verbal messages are of the greatest importance in persuasion [13], and the emotional component, in at least some conditions, has been shown to have priority over the informational one [14].…”