The Goals of Persuasive Speaking
The Goals of Persuasive Speaking
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Persuasion is also a tool that you use every day, whether you are persuading your roommates to switch from a cable TV subscription to Hulu Plus or convincing your four-year-old to eat his peas.
Persuasive speaking is speech that is intended to influence the attitudes, beliefs, and behavior of your audience. Although these three terms may be familiar to you, let’s take a moment to examine them in light of how we will think about them in this chapter.
- Attitudes are our general evaluations of people, ideas, objects, or events (Stiff & Mongeau, 2003). When you evaluate something, you judge it as good or bad, important or unimportant, boring or interesting, and so on. For example, you might have a positive attitude toward sports and exercise: “Exercising regularly is good.”
- Beliefs are the ways in which people perceive reality (Stiff & Mongeau, 2003). They are our feelings about what is true and real and refer to how confident we are about the existence or validity of something: “I believe that exercise is an important component of a healthy lifestyle.”
- Behavior is the manner in which we act or function. It refers to what we do in response to our attitudes and beliefs (Homer, 2006). For example, if your attitude about exercise is really positive and you believe that it is an important component of a healthy lifestyle, you’ll probably be motivated to get out there and walk or jog or lift weights.
In many ways, speaking to persuade your listeners is similar to speaking for informative purposes. Just look at any presidential campaign. The candidates all want to inform you about their plans and goals for the nation, but they also use organized and well-developed presentations to influence their audience’s attitudes and beliefs about their suitability for the presidency. And, of course, they want to influence your behavior by getting you to vote for them.
Influencing your audience does not necessarily mean changing their attitudes, beliefs, or behavior; it can also mean reinforcing them. For example, when a political party attempts to rally its base, it usually focuses candidates’ speeches on issues on which the party faithful already agree. To do this, they must first correctly identify an existing attitude or belief among listeners. The key to determining your audience’s attitudes—whether your goal is to change or to reinforce those attitudes—lies with audience analysis (discussed in chapter 11).
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