PERSUASION: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos
Ethos, Logos, and Pathos
are not Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers [Athos, Porthos, and
Aramis], but rather the Greek for, approximately, character, logic, and
emotion, three elements long identified as crucial for successful persuasive
communication, important in our business and personal lives.
First, I must give credit
where credit is due. I recently finished reading a fascinating and informative
book: The Power of Communication: Skills to Build Trust, Inspire Loyalty,
and Lead Effectively, by Helio Fred Garcia (2012), available in a Kindle
ebook edition and hardcover through amazon.com.
The lessons and examples are priceless, although I picked up the Kindle
ebook for a song. I wish I could have read it when I was a debater in college
eons ago.
To
be persuasive, you must be credible. This is ethos. You
must seem likely to know the topic you are addressing and to be committed to
telling the truth about it. If you are attractive, in looks and personality,
that helps. Dress appropriately. You seem likely to know the topic if you have
the right credentials, including training, experience, and achievements. You
seem likely to tell the truth if you have a history of honesty and no obvious
reason to lie. If you are an interested, rather than disinterested party…if you
will gain something by what you are “selling”…then you should admit that up
front and hope that the power of your presentation will over-ride the tendency
for your audience to doubt you.
Evidence
and logic, the tools of rationality, help persuade others. “Logic” derives from
logos. You can start from principles that your
audience shares with you and proceed to show, by “deduction,” that they support
your case. Some people will find this highly persuasive. Another approach
involves “induction,” giving examples, evidence, leading to the conclusion you
are offering. Often we try to do this with analogies, indicating that this is
like that. The problem arises that no two situations are truly identical, so
your audience may not find the comparisons compelling.
I
have listed pathos, emotion, third because I am a retired scientist and
I think that authority and reason should predominate, but psychologists tell us
that emotional connection, empathy, must come first if we are to persuade
others in daily life. We are ineffective if we approach them from
“a mood apart.” We need to “feel their pain” or seem to, “rejoice with them” if
we can…. In his book, Garcia gives the
example of the BP Chief Executive Officer Tony Hayward who, at the time of the
major BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico from the oil rig Deepwater Horizon, said, “…there’s no one who wants this thing over
more than I do. You know, I’d like my life back.” Hayward was widely criticized
for seeming to be more concerned about his discomfort than the suffering of the
Gulf Cost victims of that monumental oil spill. Here, displaying the wrong
emotion doomed Hayward, and six weeks after this, he was removed from his CEO
position.
To be persuasive, employ all
three: ethos, be the kind of person who deserves to be believed; logos,
present evidence and logic to justify your position; and most importantly, pathos,
connect emotionally with your audience…be empathetic. You can do that, right?
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Excerpted from my recent Write Your Book with Me, published by Outskirts Press and available from OP and other online booksellers like amazon.com and bn.com. The Amazon link is:
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