One of the most important psychological principles you can learn as a speaker is that audience members, and people in general, tend to evaluate information in terms of their own—rather than the speaker’s—point of view, at least until they are convinced to take a second look.1 Establishing a connection with your listeners thus starts with seeking to understand their outlook and motivations and letting this information guide you in constructing your speech. You may want to convince your classmates to support a four-day school week, but unless you know how they feel and what they know about the proposal, you won’t know how to adapt your presentation accordingly.
Being audience-centered does not mean that you must abandon your own convictions or cater to the audience’s whims. This practice, called pandering, will only undermine your credibility in the eyes of the audience. Think of audience analysis as an opportunity to get to know and establish common ground with audience members, just as you might do with a new acquaintance. The more you find out about someone, the more you can discover what you share in common and how you differ.
Appeal to Audience Members’ Attitudes, Beliefs, and Values
The audience members’ attitudes, beliefs, and values provide crucial clues to how receptive they will be toward your topic and your position on it. While intertwined, attitudes, beliefs, and values reflect distinct mental states that reveal a great deal about us. Attitudes are our general evaluations of people, ideas, objects, or events.2 To evaluate something is to judge it as relatively good or bad, useful or useless, desirable or undesirable, and so on. People generally act in accordance with their attitudes (although the degree to which they do so depends on many factors).3 If your listeners have a positive attitude toward gun ownership, for example, they’re likely to own a gun and want to listen to your speech opposing stricter gun laws.
Attitudes are based on beliefs—the ways in which people perceive reality.4 They are our feelings about what is true or real. Whereas attitudes deal with how we feel about some activity or entity (“Yoga is good” or “Regular church/mosque/synagogue attendance is good”), beliefs refer to our level of confidence about the very existence or validity of something (“I believe God exists” or “I’m not so sure that God exists”). The less faith listeners have that something exists—UFOs, for instance—the less open they are to hearing about it.
Both attitudes and beliefs are shaped by values—our most enduring judgments about what’s good in life, as shaped by our culture and our unique experiences within it. We have fewer values than either attitudes or beliefs, but they are more deeply felt and resistant to change. We feel our values strongly and use them as a compass to direct our behavior. In addition, we have positive attitudes toward our values and strive to realize them. Personal values mirror our feelings about religious, political, social, and civic matters. Cultural values (also called “core values”) reflect values deemed important by many members of a culture, imbuing it with a distinct identity.
In the United States, researchers have identified a set of cultural values prevalent in the dominant culture, including achievement and success, equal opportunity, material comfort, hard work, practicality and efficiency, change and progress, science, democracy, and freedom.5 For some of us, the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman is a cultural value. For others, the value of social justice supersedes that of material comfort. Whatever the nature of our values, they are central to our sense of who we are.
“If the Value Fits, Use It”
Evoking some combination of the audience’s values, attitudes, and beliefs in the speeches you deliver will make them more personally relevant and motivating. For example, a recent large-scale survey of values related to the environment reveals that Americans overwhelmingly feel responsible to preserve the environment for future generations, to protect nature as God’s creation, and to ensure that their families enjoy a healthy environment. Using this information, the Biodiversity Project, a communications group that helps speakers raise public awareness about the environment, counsels its clients to appeal directly to these values in their presentations, offering the following as an example of how to do this:
You care about your family’s health (value #1), and you feel a responsibility to protect your loved ones’ quality of life (value #2). The local wetland provides a sanctuary to many plants and animals. It helps to clean our air and water and provides a space of beauty and serenity (value #3). All of this is about to be destroyed by irresponsible development.6