Power of Persuasion
Power of Persuasion
Persuasion is defined in the textbook as the process of creating, reinforcing, or changing people’s belief or actions. I believe the persuasion is the ability make others do what you want or act the way you want them to. Persuasion is a great skill to have and it can take people years to learn how to do it properly. Two important points that everyone must know about persuasion is the target audience and use of emotion appeal.
The target audience is the portion of the whole audience that the speaker most wants to persuade. In the video, the four contestants were given the four different target audiences and objectives for each of them. They had to use whatever persuasion techniques they could to get the targets to do what they wanted. It was interesting to see how each one handle the situations and targets. None of them did the exact same thing but most of them did have the same results. It should how important it was for them to understand who they were talking to and how they were to persuade them to get the outcome they wanted. Understanding your target audience is extremely important in a speech and in real life situations because if you do not then you will fail in both. The contestants that did fail at certain task either did not know how to talk to the person or picked the wrong time to talk to them. Both approach and timing is needed to be successful in persuading anyone to do what you say. If one of these is off then you will most like not succeed in your goal.
Emotional appeal is intended to make the audience feel sad, angry, guilty, afraid, happy, proud, sympathetic, reverent, or the like. In the video, each of the contestants used a different form of emotional appeal in each scenario. The old lady tried to use sympathy as much as possible so she could complete each of her tasks and did do it fairly well. The lawyer was more forceful with people and may have intimated them so he could get what he wanted. He also used his ability to talk to people in such a way that they felt good about