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Emotions are more convincing than rational arguments

12.04.2018

When we want to convince someone of something, what strategy will we choose: will we appeal to the interlocutor's mind or put pressure on emotions? Psychologists from Northwestern University argue that people prefer the emotional strategy, and this is directly reflected in the words they use in conversation.

Nearly 1300 people participated in the study. All of them were shown a photo of some item from an online store and asked to make a description for it - it had to be extremely positive, but in one case it was necessary to adhere to a neutral intonation, simply listing the advantages of the product, and in the other case it was required to compose a real panegyric in order to whoever reads it immediately bought it. Then it only remained to analyze the written essays for word usage: how many words there are with one shade or another and how much emotionally rich vocabulary.

Words with a positive meaning, which were more related to the product itself - like "excellent", "beautiful", etc. - turned out to be approximately equal in both descriptive and selling texts. The difference was different: when it was required to convince another to buy a certain thing, words such as “exciting”, “exciting”, “captivating”, etc. appeared in the text, that is, clearly more emotionally colored, referring to the feelings of that who will read it.

The transition to a more emotional language occurred automatically. When participants were asked to keep a sequence of eight numbers in mind while writing a review, they still used more emotional vocabulary, although these same eight numbers were supposed to distract them, not allowing them to think about which word would be better to use in this or that case.

In general, words with more emotional load came to mind faster when the person was asked to be more persuasive, and even when asked to imagine an exceptionally reasonable audience that neglects emotions, the vocabulary of persuasive texts still turned out to be emotional.

The authors of the work did not evaluate the real convincing power of emotions, but how convincing they seem to us. In general, it is known that with an interlocutor who relies on reasonable arguments, emotions usually lead to the opposite result - that is, the interlocutor simply will not hear you. However, the connection between persuasiveness and emotionality in our minds is obviously very, very strong.

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