Appeal to emotion

Modern theories

A prominent theory in social psychology is that attitudes have three components: affect, cognition and behavior. The cognitive dimension refers "to beliefs that one holds about the attitude object, and behavior has been used to describe overt actions and responses to the attitude object." Affect, meanwhile, describes "the positive and negative feelings that one holds toward an attitude object", that is, the emotional dimension of an attitude. Modern theorists have modified the tripartite theory to argue that an attitude "does not consist of these elements, but is instead a general evaluative summary of the information derived from these bases."

Political scientist George Marcus (writing with Russell Neuman and Michael Mackuen) identifies two mental systems through which reason and emotion interact to manage and process political stimuli:

The second system, the surveillance system, "acts to scan the environment for novelty and sudden intrusion of threat." In other words, the second system monitors the environment for any sign of threat. If such a threat is found, that system takes us out of habitual, casual processing and puts us in a state of alertness and receptivity to new information:

Marcus further argues that "emotional engagement will motivate people toward making more deeply reasoned decisions about politics than those who remain dispassionate." Others have argued that "when an emotion is aroused and experienced, it can involve a number of psychological processes that can then be used as a platform for promoting and securing influence and compliance."

Regardless, it would stand to reason, then, that affecting a subject’s emotional state, in conjunction with a political message, could affect that subject’s attitudes.

Research

Accepted wisdom is that, "[w]hen it comes to issues of emotional importance, convincing someone to change his or her existing beliefs appears to be a virtually hopeless undertaking." And yet, manipulating emotions may hold the key to shaping attitudes:

Though it is still a very undeveloped area of research, a number of scholars are demonstrating that manipulating emotions surrounding a persuasive message does affect that message’s effectiveness. It has been shown, for example, that people tend to adjust their beliefs to fit their emotions, since feelings are treated by people as evidence, and when feelings match beliefs, that is seen as validation of the underlying beliefs. Other research shows that "emotional stimuli can influence judgment without a judge's awareness of having seen or felt anything (e.g., Bargh, 1997; Murphy & Zajonc, 1993)."

Indeed, "recent studies have confirmed that affect does play a general role in attitude change, whether due to persuasive communication, or to cognitive dissonance processes (Petty et al., 2001)."

Psychologists Petty & Cacioppo found that there are two ways of processing persuasive messages: (1) to focus on the content and quality of the message (central processing), or (2) to focus instead on external cues (such as the source of the message) and to disregard its content (peripheral processing). "When participants use the central/systematic route of responding to message content, they tend to be persuaded more by strong arguments, and less by weak arguments. However, the strength of the argument matters less when the peripheral route is chosen. In that case, other "peripheral" factors, such as the credibility of the source of the message or the intention of the communicator become important in the persuasive process." Petty and Cacioppo suggest that negative affect should lead to more central processing and positive affect to more peripheral processing. That is, "In happy moods, people tend to be persuaded equally by strong and weak arguments, whereas in sad moods, people are persuaded only by strong arguments and reject weak arguments." Said otherwise, positive moods increase the reliance on positive beliefs, whereas negative moods encourage the updating of beliefs in the light of new, significant data.

Drawing on the work of Marcus, political scientist Tom Brader says that, "by appealing to specific emotions, [communicators] can change the way citizens respond to political messages."

Fear and anxiety

The only widely studied emotion, with respect to persuasion, is fear. Fear has been found to force individuals "to break from routine and pay close attention to the external world," including persuasive messages. Moreover, fear has been found to encourage political engagement:

More generally, "fear is associated with both attitude and behavior change." However, "four variables that may interact to influence processing depth of a fear-inducing message: (a) type of fear (chronic vs. acute), (b) expectation of a message containing reassuring information, (c) type of behavior advocated (e.g., disease detection vs. health promotion), and (d) issue familiarity."

Guilt

Guilt is the emotion that arises when an individual breaks an internalized moral, ethical or religious rule. Guilt’s effect on persuasion has been only cursorily studied. Not unlike fear appeals, the literature suggests that guilt can enhance attainment of persuasive goals if evoked at moderate levels. However, messages designed to evoke high levels of guilt may instead arouse high levels of anger that may impede persuasive success.

Anger

Anger’s effect on persuasion has also seldom been studied. A couple of studies, however, "suggest that a positive relationship exists between anger and attitude change." Specifically, researchers found that "anger evoked in response to issues of juvenile crime and domestic terrorism correlated with acceptance of legislative initiatives proposed to address those issues." Not unlike fear, anger was associated with close (central) information processing including of persuasive messages. At the same time, "unintentionally induced anger in response to supposed guilt and fear appeals has been shown to correlate negatively with attitudes."

Sadness

Sadness arousal has been associated with attitude change in the context of AIDS, illicit drugs, and juvenile crime.

Disgust

Disgust arousal, in the context of messages opposing animal experimentation, is correlated negatively with attitude change. This is consistent with the view that disgust leads to a rejection of its source.

Empathy and compassion

A number of recent studies support the role of compassion in skewing moral judgment. The researchers’ findings show there is a key relationship between moral judgment and empathic concern in particular, specifically feelings of warmth and compassion in response to someone in distress.

Images of suffering children are the ideal triggers of this instinctive compassion.

Once triggered, compassion leads individuals to favor the few they see suffering over the many who they know to be suffering but in the abstract: "People who feel similar to another person in need have been shown to experience more empathic compassion for that person than do those not manipulated to feel similar to another."

Dan Ariely notes that appeals that, through visual cues or otherwise, make us focus on specific, individual victims affect our attitudes and lead us to take action whereas, "when many people are involved, we don’t. A cold calculation does not increase our concern for large problems; instead, it suppresses our compassion."

Pride

"Little studied in the social influence context, the one clearly identifiable study of pride and persuasion considered the role of culture in response to advertising, finding that members of a collectivist culture (China) responded more favorably to a pride-based appeal, whereas members of an individualist culture (the United States) responded more favorably to an empathy-based appeal."

Relief

Some researchers have argued that anxiety which is followed by relief leads to greater compliance to a request than fear, because the relief causes a temporary state of disorientation, leaving individuals vulnerable to suggestion. The suggestion is that relief-based persuasion is a function of less careful information processing.

Hope

Experiments have shown that hope appeals are successful mainly with subjects who self-report as being predisposed to experiencing fear

Examples