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Your listeners’ disposition—their attitude toward your topic—should affect your approach to persuading them. As we discuss in chapter 5, your audience may be hostile, sympathetic, or neutral toward the topic of your speech, and you should adjust your thesis depending on which audience type you are addressing.

The starting point is determining where your audience stands on the issue. For example, suppose your goal is the adoption of an open parking policy on your campus. Under this policy, the best parking lots would no longer be reserved for faculty, staff, and administrators. Students and employees could park in the more convenient lots on a first-come-first-served basis. You might have the chance to advocate for your idea before several different audiences:

Although you want to advocate open parking with each of these audiences, you wouldn’t use the same supporting arguments with each. Faculty and administrators may have a hostile disposition toward your idea because current policy allocates the best parking spots to them. They might believe that the current policy is fair, since they had to park in remote locations back when they were students. On the other hand, student senate members are likely to have a sympathetic disposition. Not only would they enjoy better parking spots when driving to campus, but they would also be aware of the fact that they need to take pro-student positions to get reelected. Finally, students who don’t have a car may have a neutral disposition because they are not affected by parking policies. They may support student rights in general, but they may not be motivated to invest much time and energy promoting open parking.

Once you know where your audience stands, you can tailor your thesis appropriately. Audience members have a latitude of acceptance, which is the range of positions on a given issue that are acceptable to them. Likewise, they also have a range of positions that are unacceptable, constituting their latitude of rejection.⁸ Listeners who are very concerned about your issue tend to have a narrower latitude of acceptance. If the issue is not very important to them, they will be open to a broader range of positions.⁹

Therefore, you’re most likely to persuade your listeners to change their minds if the position you take on your topic falls within their latitude of acceptance. Conversely, you won’t likely persuade audience members if your position falls within their latitude of rejection—especially if they have very strong viewpoints that differ from yours. Under these conditions, your speech may even produce a boomerang effect—the act of pushing your listeners to oppose your idea even more vigorously than they already do.¹⁰

How does all this work in practice? Let’s return to the example of your effort to promote open parking on campus. If you are addressing the faculty and administration (a hostile audience), a speech advocating a change to open parking is likely to be counterproductive because it falls within their latitude of rejection. However, your audience analysis might reveal that these listeners would be willing to try the policy for a week or convert a single faculty lot to open parking. If so, you could advocate one of these options.

Conversely, when you address the student senate (a sympathetic audience), you can ask for much more. Their latitude of acceptance may include not just a supportive vote but also a willingness to give their time to your campaign. For this audience, you could select an ambitious thesis—such as asking student representatives to pass a resolution declaring their support and to meet with college administrators to promote your idea.

Finally, you would take still another approach for the students who do not drive to campus (a neutral audience). Asking them to sign a petition advocating open parking would most likely fall within their latitude of acceptance because they probably support benefits for students, and petition signing requires little effort on their part. However, if you asked them to pass out flyers, this greater demand on their time might fall within their latitude of rejection.