6,000 years ago Aristotle taught us that messages are persuasive when they exhibit 1. ethos (a credible reference to authority), 2. pathos (an appeal to the emotions) and 3. logos (a sound pattern of reasoning).

Does Aristotle’s teaching still apply? A few contemporary examples suggest that it does.

Insight: logos

There is a reason that Nassim Taleb warns us of the “narrative fallacy” in “The Black Swan” [1].

The narrative fallacy refers to our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them.

The implication of the narrative fallacy is that we are captivated by stories. The more logically coherent the story, the more believable it seems. We are pulled towards a coherent story because of our innate desire for seeking patterns. In fact, coherence trumps correctness and completeness.

Insight: pathos

Paul Slovic shows us in the “affect heuristic” that how we feel influences how we think since “experienced feelings are used as information in the decision process” [2].

The more salient something is, the greater the impact. An example is a Save the Children campaign that was 25% more impactful when a picture of a single starving child was used than when the statistics of the extent of starvation (millions of children) were expressed. Ironically, this is consistent with Stalin’s “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. Slovic explains that statistics don’t activate our moral emotions.

Insight: ethos

Most readers are probably familiar with Stanley Milgram’s classic obedience to authority experiment [3]. And, about a decade later Philip Zimbardo, one of Milgram’s students, architected and ran the “Stanford prison experiment” [4]. These classic experiments, along with more recent research, convincingly demonstrate how persuasive authority figures can be.

Imperative:

The key takeaway for business executives is that if you want to deliver a persuasive message, then structure a coherent story, ensure there is a credible source / storyteller and infuse emotion.

References:

Wikipedia: modes of persuasion

[1] "The Black Swan", Nassim Taleb (2007)

[2] "Affect, Risk and Decision Making", Paul Slovic et al (2005)

[3] Wikipedia: Milgram experiment

[4] Wikipedia: Stanford prison experiment