Posted 1 year ago
Pathos Matters
Every Tuesday at 7am, I meet with members of the IUPUI Speech and Debate team to practice and coach with them. Speech and Debate (also called ‘Forensics’) is an activity designed to give students at the high school and college level the opportunity to utilize skills in persuasion and communication to support an argument of some kind. Whether its done through a Poetry program, a Persuasive public address, or an Impromptu style, students learn to make an arguments.
When teaching students how to be persuasive arguers, most instructors start-off with Aristotle’s Appeals: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.
- Ethos (Credibility), or ethical appeal, means convincing by the character of the author. We tend to believe people whom we respect.
- Logos (Logical) means persuading by the use of reasoning or logic. Deductive and inductive reasoning, etc.
- Pathos (Emotional) means persuading by appealing to the reader’s emotions. Language choice affects the audience’s emotional response, and emotional appeal can effectively be used to enhance an argument.
With an understanding of these three components of argumentation, one can start to break down criticism’s of political candidates. For example, most political campaigns focus on attacks on opposing candidates credibility (ethos) or policy plans (logos) through the use of emotional appeals to the constituency (pathos). So when Republican’s criticized Candidate Obama, they most frequently made appeals to his lack of experience (ethos) and that his policy prescriptions were fully bunk (logos) if not outright dangerous for the country…
…but Candidate Obama still won…and he won handily.
If you agree that his credibility and his policy prescriptions were worse than John McCain’s (which I do), then the strongest appeal that Barack Obama made, and the appeal he utilizes successfully to this day is ‘emotional connection’ with the voters. Put more simply, Barack Obama is a strongly (and mostly) ‘pathos’ driven candidate. So strong that he was able to practically ignore the other argument types all together.
What does this mean? It means this: Pathos Matters.
No longer should a candidate be concerned with his policy prescriptions or his experience compared to other candidates. Rather, a candidate should be first and foremost concerned with attempting to simply connect with the emotions of the voters. And luckily for most of us, public speeches are not the only way we can hope to attain this connection.
Social media has allowed candidates and political parties to build these emotional connections more effectively through the use of the public domain and free online information flow. Whether through consistent blogging, SMS communication, or other mediums, anyone attempting to advocate or persuade MUST put a GREAT deal of effort into their pathos; And that is not something that has been done at all over the past 20 years, let alone something that has been done well.
The GOP is making strides to connect on a more personal level through the use of social media. A few months ago (perhaps longer) they jumped ahead of the pack with a website relaunch that improved their overall web presence by several knotches. Lately they have been releasing web ads against the Obama administration that are clearly of a higher production quality and cinematographic excellence than had been typical a few years ago.
The GOP is remaking itself into an organization designed to be viral; Content and argument created for a social media age. In other words…the GOP is following Barack Obama’s lead and attempting to prove, yet again, that Pathos Matters.
