Emotional and Physiological Elements of Persuasive Appeals

• In Event: The Interplay between Emotions and Politics

Abstract

The topic of persuasion is of perennial importance to many disciplines in the social sciences, including psychology, communication, and political science. This is especially true in the current context of political conflict, misinformation, polarization, and technological tools that have shifted the landscape of interpersonal communication. Survey data from the American National Election Studies, for example, show that in a typical Presidential election cycle, up to eighty percent of Americans say they have talked about politics with family and friends, and nearly half of Americans report trying to persuade someone else about how they should vote. While this behavior is common, we do not have a good understanding of how persuasion happens between people in everyday life or how people act when they are attempting to persuade others. One obstacle to rigorous analysis of interpersonal persuasion is that high-quality data can be difficult to collect, and many aspects of the process are difficult to observe. Much of the internal and interpersonal workings of persuasion, then, remain a black box. This limits the ability of researchers and practitioners to understand how ideas spread and to understand how changing norms of communication impact political attitudes and outcomes.

Using an online survey experiment with approximately 2000 participants from the United States, we explore the psychological, emotional, and physiological markers of attempts at interpersonal political persuasion, as compared to other kinds of speech activities.. In our study, after some initial demographic questions, respondents record a short video of themselves making different kinds of statements to another imagined survey respondent. Participants are randomly assigned to record one of four kinds of videos – one on a political topic trying to persuade another person; one on the same political topic but with instructions to be fair and balanced; one on a nonpolitical topic trying to persuade; and one on the same nonpolitical topic but with instructions not to persuade someone. Gathering recordings that vary both the content domain and the speaker’s purpose allows us to consider differences across both dimensions (political or non-political, persuasive or non-persuasive). After recording the videos, respondents are asked to indicate the position they took and how persuasive they thought they were in their recordings.

We use specialized software to analyze the recordings for three main things - facial expressions, vocal tone, and the content of the statements. These externally-observable features can be used as markers for differences in emotional arousal, attention, focus, confidence, and sentiment. Using these analytic tools, we explore how speakers’ behaviors vary across the different experimental conditions. We focus on comparisons between the four prompts (the combinations of political and persuasive emphases) to evaluate what differentiates persuasion attempts from non-persuasive communication and political and nonpolitical discourse.

The data from this study provides a rich opportunity to explore the psychological dynamics of interpersonal persuasion in great detail. In this paper, we discuss different makers of political persuasion and the degree to which these three areas - facial expressions, vocal tone, and content - are more or less useful in understanding what constitutes an attempt at political persuasion, and how distinctive it is from other kinds of speech acts. This provides important insights into research on persuasion broadly and novel ways to analyze and evaluate citizens’ political discourse. We end the paper with a discussion of how these findings can be used to inform future studies and consider how people respond to the tactics and features evaluated in this study.

Authors

• Lisa P. Argyle, Brigham Young University

• Ethan C Busby, Brigham Young University

• Christopher F. Karpowitz, Brigham Young University