The SAGE Handbook of Persuasion Read online

  The SAGE Handbook of

  Persuasion

  Second Edition

  We dedicate this book to Michael Pfau: a scholar, a colleague, and a friend.

  The SAGE Handbook of

  Persuasion

  Second Edition

  Developments in Theory and Practice

  Edited by

  James Price Dillard

  Pennsylvania State University

  Lijiang Shen

  University of Georgia

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  Copyright © 2013 by SAGE Publications, Inc.

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  The SAGE handbook of persuasion : developments in theory and practice / edited by James Price Dillard, Lijiang Shen. — 2nd ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4129-8313-6 (cloth)

  1. Persuasion (Psychology)—Social aspects. 2. Persuasion (Rhetoric) I. Dillard, James Price. II. Shen, Lijiang. III. Title: Handbook of persuasion.

  HM1196.P47

  2013 153.8´52—dc23 2012017340

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  12 13 14 15 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  PART I. FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES

  1. Persuasion in the Rhetorical Tradition

  J. Michael Hogan

  2. The Effects of Message Features: Content, Structure, and Style

  Lijiang Shen and Elisabeth Bigsby

  3. Media Influence as Persuasion

  R. Lance Holbert and John M. Tchernev

  4. Outcomes of Persuasion: Behavioral, Cognitive, and Social

  Nancy Rhodes and David R. Ewoldsen

  5. On Being Persuaded: Some Basic Distinctions

  Gerald R. Miller

  PART II. THEORIES, PERSPECTIVES, AND TRADITIONS

  6. Discrepancy Models of Belief Change

  Edward L. Fink and Deborah A. Cai

  7. Functional Attitude Theory

  Christopher Carpenter, Franklin J. Boster, and Kyle R. Andrews

  8. Reasoned Action Theory: Persuasion as Belief-Based Behavior Change

  Marco Yzer

  9. The Elaboration Likelihood Model

  Daniel J. O’Keefe

  10. Affect and Persuasion

  James Price Dillard and Kiwon Seo

  11. Reactance Theory and Persuasion

  Brian L. Quick, Lijiang Shen, and James Price Dillard

  12. Fear Appeals

  Paul A. Mongeau

  13. Narrative Persuasion

  Helena Bilandzic and Rick Busselle

  14. Inoculation Theory

  Josh Compton

  15. Supportive and Persuasive Communication: Theoretical Intersections

  Graham D. Bodie

  PART III. CONTEXTS, SETTINGS, AND APPLICATIONS

  16. Political Persuasion

  Richard M. Perloff

  17. Persuasive Strategies in Health Campaigns

  Charles K. Atkin and Charles T. Salmon

  18. The Siren’s Call: Mass Media and Drug Prevention

  William D. Crano, Jason T. Siegel, and Eusebio M. Alvaro

  19. Persuasion in the Marketplace: How Theories of Persuasion Apply to Marketing and Advertising

  L. J. Shrum, Min Liu, Mark Nespoli, and Tina M. Lowrey

  20. Persuasion in the Legal Setting

  John C. Reinard

  21. Persuading in the Small Group Context

  Kyle R. Andrews, Franklin J. Boster, and Christopher J. Carpenter

  22. When Presumed Influence Turns Real: An Indirect Route of Media Influence

  Ye Sun

  23. How Does Technology Persuade? Theoretical Mechanisms for Persuasive Technologies

  S. Shyam Sundar, Jeeyun Oh, Hyunjin Kang, and Akshaya Sreenivasan

  Author Index

  Subject Index

  About the Authors

  PART I

  Fundamental Issues

  CHAPTER 1

  Persuasion in the Rhetorical Tradition

  J. Michael Hogan

  The study of persuasion can be traced back to ancient Greece, the birthplace of both rhetoric and democracy. As Dillard and Pfau (2002) noted in the first edition of The Persuasion Handbook, Aristotle “provided the first comprehensive theory of rhetorical discourse” (p. ix) in the fifth century BCE, and persuasion was central to that theory. Yet persuasion has not always been at the center of rhetorical theory. During the Enlightenment, the scope of rhetoric broadened to include aesthetic and psychological concerns, rendering persuasion secondary to considerations of “taste” and “sympathy.” More recently, narrative and dramatistic theories of rhetoric have emphasized identity or “identification” over persuasion, and some rhetorical scholars have even denounced persuasion as a mechanism of “control and domination” (Foss & Griffin, 1995, p. 2). Still, persuasion has remained a dominant theme in the rhetorical tradition, with two broad concerns distinguishing the rhetorical perspective from more scientific or empirical approaches to persuasion: a focus on the political or civic contexts of persuasion, and an overriding emphasis on ethical concerns.

  In this chapter, I survey the rhetorical tradition with a view toward illuminating some of the differing, even competing, perspectives on persuasion over the long history of rhetorical studies. In the process I highlight two cultural imperatives that help to account for the emphasis on politics and ethics in the Western rhetorical tradition: (1) the need to educate for citizenship, and (2) an ongoing debate over the rules or norms of democratic deliberation. In the rhetorical tradition, these two imperatives link the study of rhetoric to democratic theory, inspiring normative conceptions of persuasion that emphasize the responsibilities that go along with the right of free speech in a democracy. By surveying how rhetorical theorists historically have distinguished responsible or legitimate free speech from propaganda and demagoguery, I illuminate the intimate connections between rhetorical theories of persuasion and democracy itself.

  I begin by revisiting the classical/humanistic roots of the rhetorical tradition, from the sophists of ancient Greece to the Roman rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian. I then sketch the history of rhetorical theory through modern tim
es, including the attack on rhetoric in the early modern period and the impact of the belletristic and elocutionary movements on rhetorical theory. Finally, I consider more recent developments in rhetorical theory, including the influence of Burkean “dramatism,” the rise of social movement studies, and the “postmodern” challenge to the rhetorical tradition. As we shall see, many of these more recent developments have been cast as alternatives to the classical/humanistic tradition of persuasion (indeed, some have challenged the very idea of a “rhetorical tradition”). Yet despite these various challenges, the classical tradition’s emphasis on the ethics of civic persuasion remains strong in contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism.

  In the second section of the chapter, I reflect on the distinctive contributions of the American tradition of rhetoric and public address to the theory and practice of persuasion. Surveying the linkages between America’s great experiment in democracy and evolving attitudes toward rhetoric and persuasion, I begin by recalling how the founders’ constitutional design reflected a vision of a deliberative democracy grounded in neoclassical rhetorical theory. I then trace how the American rhetorical tradition evolved during the so-called golden age of American oratory, as Jacksonian democracy brought a more populist rhetorical style to American politics and the debate over slavery tested the limits of civic persuasion. I next consider the revival of the American rhetorical tradition during the Progressive Era, as new media, changing demographics, and a culture of professionalization revolutionized the way Americans talked about politics and gave rise to a new “science” of mass persuasion. Finally, I reflect on the impact of new electronic media and the relationship between television and the decline of civic discourse in the closing decades of the 20th century. I conclude with some brief reflections on the contemporary crisis of democracy in America and the efforts of a new, interdisciplinary deliberative democracy movement to revive the public sphere.

  The Concept of Persuasion in Rhetorical Theory

  * * *

  The story of rhetoric’s roots in ancient Greece has been told many times—and for a variety of purposes. For generations, that story was used to justify speech programs in American colleges and universities. At the height of the Cold War, for example, W. Norwood Brigance, one of the pioneers of the American speech discipline, invoked rhetoric’s ancient roots to argue that the teaching of speech was one of the distinguishing marks of a free society. Democracy and the “system of speechmaking were born together,” Brigance (1961) wrote, and since ancient times “we have never had a successful democracy unless a large part, a very large part, of its citizens were effective, intelligent, and responsible speakers.” According to Brigance, there were only two kinds of people in the modern world: “Those who in disagreements and crises want to shoot it out, and those who have learned to talk it out.” Brigance concluded that if America hoped to remain a “government by talk,” it needed leaders who knew how to talk “effectively, intelligently, and responsibly,” as well as citizens trained to “listen and judge” (pp. 4–5).

  Since Brigance’s day, revisionist scholars have told and “retold” rhetoric’s story to advance a variety of agendas. In Rereading the Sophists, for example, Jarratt (1991) reconsidered the Greek sophists from a feminist perspective and concluded that they were more progressive in their thinking about “social needs” (p. 28) than most of the more prominent figures in the classical tradition. In Jarratt’s rereading of the tradition, the sophists provided an alternative to patriarchal rhetoric by privileging “imaginative reconstructions” over “empirical data” (p. 13) and by broadening the purview of rhetoric beyond canonical texts. The sophists also modeled a more collaborative and democratic model of rhetorical education, according to Jarratt—one more consistent with today’s best research on critical pedagogy and “social cognition” (p. 92).

  The sophists were no doubt important to the rhetorical tradition. But so, too, were Plato, Aristotle, and the great Roman rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian. It is important to recognize that no single paradigm defines the classical rhetorical tradition. Rather, that tradition consists of ongoing debates over the philosophical status of rhetoric, the best methods of rhetorical education, and the aims, scope, power, and ethics of rhetoric—indeed, over the very definition of “rhetoric” itself. Yet even as we recognize the rhetorical tradition itself as a dynamic and ongoing set of controversies, we can identify two emphases in the classical tradition that have distinguished the rhetorical perspective ever since: (1) an emphasis on the role of persuasion in politics and civic life, and (2) an overriding concern with the moral character of the speaker and the ethics of persuasion.

  The Ancient Tradition

  The sophists were the original professors of rhetoric in Greece, and they initiated a long tradition of teaching speech and persuasion as education for citizenship. As Hunt (1965) noted, the original sophists were professional teachers who helped meet the need for rhetorical and civic training in Athens, and the term “sophist” initially referred to “any man … thought to be learned” (p. 71). Over time, however, the sophists acquired a negative reputation as arrogant and boastful—a reputation that echoed down through the centuries because of a famous dialogue written by their best-known critic, the philosopher Plato. In the Gorgias, Plato accused the sophists of teaching students to flatter or pander to their audiences, and Plato’s criticisms so impressed succeeding generations that the sophists came to stand for a whole range of human flaws: the “false pretense of knowledge, overweening conceit, fallacious argument, cultivation of style for its own sake, demagoguery, corruption of youth …, and, in general, a ready substitution of appearance for reality” (Hunt, 1965, p. 69).

  In the master narrative of the rhetorical tradition, Plato’s student, Aristotle, rescued rhetoric’s reputation by devising an “amoral” or “morally neutral” theory focused purely on techné, or the mechanics of persuasive speaking. Leaving ethical questions to the philosophers, Aristotle defined rhetoric as the faculty of “discovering in the particular case … the available means of persuasion” (Cooper, 1932, p. 7), and he recognized that this power “could be used either for good or ill” (Kennedy, 1991, p. ix). While Aristotle refrained from grand moral pronouncements, however, he did infuse his rhetorical theory with a strong ethical or normative component. Emphasizing moral character as a key element in persuasion and celebrating reasoned argument over appeals to the emotions, Aristotle’s rhetoric was hardly morally neutral about what constituted responsible persuasion in civic life. Moreover, his vision of civic persuasion demanded broad learning in philosophy, history, literature, and human psychology. For Aristotle, rhetoric was not only a moral but also an architectonic art, encompassing all realms of humanistic and scientific understanding.

  Similarly, Isocrates, one of the later sophists, responded to Plato’s attack on rhetoric by rejecting both the empty and commercialized speech of his fellow sophists and the abstract philosophizing of Plato and the Socratics. Rather than mere techné, Isocrates viewed rhetoric as a means for educating students to “think and speak noble, virtuous ideas” and to “implement them in civic policy” (Kennedy, 1991, p. 11). For Isocrates, the ultimate goal of a rhetorical education was not to prepare students for personal success, but to train them for public service and “inspire the political life of [the] nation with a higher moral creed” (Jaegar, 1965, p. 108). The ethical and civic spirit of the Greek rhetoricians was even stronger in the writings of the Roman rhetoricians, Cicero and Quintilian. Bringing a more pragmatic, pedagogical emphasis to the study of rhetoric, the Romans added little to the Greeks’ repertoire of persuasive techniques. In systematizing rhetorical instruction and grounding it in a theory of civic republicanism, however, they painted a portrait of the ideal citizen in a free republic and upheld a high moral standard: the “common good.” For the Romans, the ideal orator was not merely one with “exceptional gifts of speech,” but also a “good man” with “all the excellences of character” (Butler, 1969, pp
. 9–11). They considered the principles of moral conduct an integral part of the rhetorical art, not something to be left to the ethicists or philosophers.

  Cicero’s chief contribution to the theory of civic rhetoric was his emphasis on the practical or functional aspects of the art, which he elucidated from the perspective of a practicing orator. As the “most eminent orator of Roman civilization” (Baldwin, 1924, p. 43), Cicero aspired to restore the art of rhetoric to its exalted status in Greek civilization, and he was “influenced and guided” in this effort “by the doctrines of Isocrates,” whom he regarded as the “father of eloquence” (Thonssen & Baird, 1948, p. 81). Like Isocrates, Cicero painted a portrait of the ideal orator as an engaged citizen of high moral character and broad learning, one devoted not to his own selfish interests but to the “common good.” In the first book of his most important work, De Oratore, Cicero lamented the scarcity of great orators in his own day and blamed that problem on the “incredible vastness and difficulty of the subject” (Sutton & Rackham, 1983, p. 13). In addition to “knowledge of very many matters,” Cicero’s ideal orator mastered the psychology of the human emotions, stocked his memory with “the complete history of the past,” and commanded a “store of precedents” grounded in both “statute law and our national law” (p. 15). Then he had to deliver all that knowledge effectively, with the voice, facial expressions, physical gestures, and the movement of the body all carefully regulated. For Cicero, true eloquence demanded training “in all the liberal arts” (p. 55), as well as mastery of the “moral science” of “human life and conduct” (pp. 50–51).