Persuasive Emotions

PERSUASIVE EMOTIONS

In Chapter 10 of The Art of Logic, we discussed the starting points of language and the fact that some basic words have to come from somewhere before a language can develop in even a vaguely logical way. Those words can have strong emotional effects on people. When mathematicians choose words for new mathematical concepts they often think very hard about what sort of emotional response they want to elicit. There is something in a name after all, even if “that which we call a rose by any name other would smell as sweet” according to Shakespeare’s Juliet. She was, of course, being touchingly naive. Would you be able to sniff a rose seriously if it was suddenly renamed “diarrhoea”? It might take some mental effort.

I had cause to think about the logic and emotions of words when American Airlines changed its boarding procedure. Instead of having different “priority groups” boarding before Group 1, it renamed those priority groups with the numbers 1–4, shifting the first normal boarding group to become Group 5. This caused all sorts of confusion because people were not able to listen to instructions, read their boarding pass, or understand the logic of it (or all three). Personally I think, logically, it makes no structural difference as the boarding groups still board in the same order, and surely it doesn’t matter whether the groups are called Platinum and Gold or red and blue or banana and frog, or 1 and 2. But apparently some people are very upset about not being in a group called “priority” any more. To them, that word really matters. It is causing an emotional effect and not a logical effect. The people who were upset about not being in a priority group were upset about the word, not about the actual boarding process.

A much more serious version of this mistake over language is a study 1 of young male university students finding that they seem to think forced intercourse might not be rape. The study found that many more men admitted that they had coerced somebody to intercourse than admitted they had raped anybody. One might call it a “false inequivalence” situation where some men think that non-consensual intercourse is not the same thing as rape. It tragically demonstrates how far we still have to go when it comes to education around consent.

The emotional connotations of language can be exploited deliberately, as in the use of the nickname “Obamacare” for the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in the US, as we discussed in Chapter 3. If someone supports ACA but not Obamacare it is painfully clear that they are not evaluating things by their merits, but by their names. This shows the power of language, again in a “false inequivalence” situation. This is all an example of how something emotional can be used to guide or even manipulate people’s thought processes in a way that has nothing to do with logic.

The idea of manipulation has negative associations. If someone is called manipulative that is not a good thing. The world is trying to manipulate us all the time, especially corporations, politicians and the media. One reason to be able to think more clearly is to be able to withstand the onslaught of manipulation that is flooding our world.

However, as with other emotional tools, there are reasons to embrace the power of emotional manipulation if it can help us overcome things in our own lives. Emotional manipulation helped me overcome my fear of flying, when statistics alone wouldn’t do it: the logic was no match for my emotions. Emotional engagement was also crucial to me losing weight, as statistics about health risks were not enough – it was not until I became viscerally afraid of becoming morbidly obese that I was able to do it. (It is not acceptable to use this as a technique on other people as it consists of “fat-shaming”.)

Sometimes people use grey areas to manipulate us, but we can also use grey areas to manipulate ourselves. I use emotional tricks on myself to motivate myself, overcome mind blocks, stop procrastinating. Perhaps if I were a more logical person I would never lack motivation, get mind blocks, or procrastinate. My mother, the most logical person I know, never procrastinates. But that is a level of logic that is beyond me. Berating myself does not enable me to become logical, and berating others will not make them become more logical either. Thus we need to deal with others and ourselves in an emotional way when we are dealing with the emotional part of ourselves.

In the “post-truth” world, feelings are often presented as facts. Some people accuse others of conflating feelings with facts, especially if they seem to be convinced by something other than logic and evidence. And indeed many people are convinced by personal experience, someone charismatic telling them something, peer pressure, tribe mentality, fear or love. Advertising and marketing drive much of our experience of the world. Marketing is not about demonstrating that a product is better; it is about making people feel that a product is better, even if it’s essentially the same as all the other ones (or worse).

But these methods of convincing people of things aren’t all bad. We generally seem to accept that we become wiser through personal experience, and that there is something valid to be learnt from it. Charismatic teachers are an important part of what can make a very good education. Peer pressure and tribe mentality can contribute to change for good as well as bad, for example in the civil rights movement. If people give up smoking because of peer pressure rather than because the evidence says smoking is bad for you, they have at least still given up smoking. But making decisions based on fear is often said to be a negative way of approaching life, and elections based on fear are unpleasant and divisive.

Some fields have become particularly good at invoking emotions to convince people of their message. This might include religious leaders, public speakers, some teachers, advertisers and artists. Science sometimes suffers from the belief that only evidence and logic should be used to convey a conclusion. But this is unrealistic. If we are to do that, then we’ll have to start by convincing everyone to be persuaded only by evidence and logic. And how do we do that using only evidence and logic, if people are not already convinced by evidence and logic? This leaves a circular problem: persuading someone to accept a method before they already accept its standards of persuasion.

Moreover, it is unrealistic to think that people can be persuaded by logic alone. In fact, it is in too many cases hypocritical, as scientists themselves are not immune from veering into drawing conclusions based on personal experience or emotions on controversial topics such as women in science.

Instead of denigrating emotions in a quest for more rigorous discourse, we should acknowledge their truth and seek to find the sense in which there is logic to them.