Chapter 8: Emotions
8.2 The Strengths & Weaknesses of Emotional Appeals
Strengths
All of this is intended to establish that people connect to each other through emotions, so to the extent that the purpose of communication is to make connections, emotional expression does this better than other types of communication. This is why newscasts are not just about what happened: including reaction shots of the people involved makes an event real for an audience (e.g., don’t just show the tornado debris, but talk to the homeowners about what it was like to lose everything). Chapter 3 discussed defamation trials (under “Ethical Blogging”), noting that juries have awarded some huge verdicts in recent defamation trials. This wouldn’t happen unless those juries understood what it feels like to have your good name ruined.
Emotional communication is not just about connection, however: it’s also about motivation and movement. In the Elephant-Rider-Path model from Chapter 6, don’t forget that it’s the elephant who actually does the walking. The word “movement” comes from the Latin movere, which turned into the Old French word emouvoir (“to stir up”), from which we get the Middle French word émotion. Emotions move people. It is no coincidence that we say “that was a moving speech” to refer to one with strong emotional impact.
If you look at the most effective and memorable speakers of the last century — Martin Luther King Jr., Winston Churchill, and, unfortunately, Adolph Hitler — what people remember best is not the intellectual content of their speeches, but how those speeches made them feel. The ideas in the “I Have a Dream” speech are all very simple, and in fact, from an intellectual side, the speech can be criticized for being a jumble of mixed metaphors (manacles of segregation, bad checks, islands of poverty, quicksands of injustice, storms of persecution). An English teacher might say that King should have followed just one such metaphor through the whole speech rather than jumping around from one visual image to another. But it seems unfair to criticize the speech on these grounds, because the logical progression is not what made it so powerful. The reason it is considered one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century is because of how it made people feel: filled with hope, and determined to act.
Since then, many deep thinkers have written detailed analyses of race relations in America, but it’s safe to say that none of those pieces has had anywhere near the impact of “I Have a Dream.” No matter how brilliant, such analyses don’t have much influence on the world unless they move people. Eighteenth-century theologian Emanuel Swedenborg said “anything that does not enter the heart dies in the mind.” Some scholars think that communication is primarily about the transfer of intellectual ideas, but this chapter’s opening quote by brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor is a reminder that humans are fundamentally emotional beings, not intellectual ones. The subtitle of this chapter, “Who Feels It Knows It,” is the title of a song by reggae singer Bob Marley, illustrating the idea that even something as intellectual-sounding as “knowledge” is really about feeling.
People remember emotions, too. Writer Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” The relationship between emotion and memory is not a straightforward one, because emotions can be fleeting and thus quickly forgotten, or they can be long-remembered (ask anyone who was actually at MLK’s speech).
One emotional need that’s often forgotten is the need for comfort, especially in times of unrest and anxiety. It helps explain the rise of conspiracy theories: for some people, the thought that a hidden organization controls the world is emotionally comforting. Add to that the emotional satisfaction of feeling like you have secret knowledge unknown to the ignorant masses (a feeling conspiracy theorists share with college students, by the way, since all that tuition money is worth it only if you learn things that people without college degrees don’t know), and a cozy sense of belonging with other people who share your views, and you can understand why conspiracy theorists often sound condescending when talking about the “sheeple” who are too naive to look at the truth about how things work. Now imagine how it feels if an outsider (to whom they feel no sense of connection) systematically proves that their theories are false and they are a fool for believing them; where is the comfort now? Redditor PetiPal, discussing why COVID conspiracy theories were so strongly held even by people who were dying of COVID, wrote “The conspiracies were an emotional tool for them, and they will outlive everything else until a more comforting emotional tool comes along.” This is not to defend the value of false theories, but rather to point out that mocking people for seeking comfort in the wrong places does not motivate them to change their mind.
Weaknesses
The downsides of emotional appeals, however, are significant. First and foremost, note the phrase “I resented the manipulation” when I described why some emotional expressions backfire for me. Emotional appeals have long been seen as a form of manipulation and exploitation, and in the eternal battle between intellect and feeling, “let’s think rationally about this” and “be reasonable” sound so much more respectable than “getting emotional about it.” Some scholars have hypothesized that there is a gender or cultural bias in the view that intellect is preferable to emotion.[1] In any case, it’s a deeply entrenched view for many.
Clearly there are people who appeal to fear in order to control others, so the ethical implications are undeniable. One reason it’s possible to control people through fear is because when fear rises to a high enough level, the reasoning mind shuts down. The word “panic” incorporates both the emotion of fear and the tendency to make very bad choices.
Even if people aren’t in a state of panic or high emotional arousal, however, they can see an emotional appeal as manipulative, and react against it as a result. Blatant sympathy appeals or “guilt trips” often backfire, and the targets may accuse the source of “yanking their chain.” Some people like going to “tear-jerker” movies, but to others, that phrase itself depicts the problem — they don’t like having someone “jerk” the tears out of their eyes. When someone tells me “This video will make you cry, I guarantee it” or “I dare you not to laugh,” it just triggers reactance [see Chapter 6] and guarantees that I won’t have any emotional reaction. Don’t tell me what to feel!
Another weakness of emotional appeals is that emotions are unpredictable. Sometimes people think dramatic movies are funny instead of touching, sometimes they sympathize with the villain instead of the hero, and sometimes they panic when you try to calm them down. Characters in scripted movies and TV shows might behave in predictable ways, but real people don’t always do that. In the times in my life when I’ve anxiously anticipated a difficult conversation with a loved one, for example, the conversation has never once turned out the way I thought it would. (This isn’t to say that it always turned out better than I dreaded it would; it was just different).
This unpredictability can take several different forms. The examples in the previous paragraph are people reacting with the wrong emotion. Other times, a source might succeed in producing the right emotion, but the receiver directs it at the wrong target: a different person or thing than the one the source intended. Your dentist might try to get you to start flossing your teeth by putting the fear of tooth decay into you, but instead you just fear the dentist instead. The documentary Bowling for Columbine ends with a scene in which director Michael Moore confronts actor Charlton Heston, who was head of the National Rifle Association at the time, asking him tough questions about gun rallies following mass shootings. Moore chose it as the last scene of the film, so he must have thought it succeeded in generating anger toward gun advocates — but instead many viewers got angry at Moore for conducting a “shameful ambush” on an old man.
Another weakness of emotional appeals relates to duration: the effect may be short-lived. Yes, the Maya Angelou quote points out that some emotions are long-remembered, but others dissipate quickly. This is why fundraising ads for animal shelters or famine relief programs end with urgent pleas to “CALL NOW! OPERATORS ARE STANDING BY” — because if you don’t donate right then, when the emotion is at its peak, you probably won’t do it later when your mood has changed. Compassion fatigue is a serious problem for charity organizations and medical caregivers. Other kinds of emotions, such as fear and anger, change over time as well; sometimes the feeling just runs out.
In sum: an emotional appeal, like any other form of communication, has its advantages and disadvantages, and understanding them can help you make good choices about when to use such an appeal and when not to. Messages that lack an emotional dimension can be too abstract and esoteric to have much impact; messages that are too emotional can cloud thought and backfire. For me, at least, what works best are ideas that make me feel, and feelings that make me think. The rest of this chapter looks at how emotions work in general, and at how particular emotions differ from each other.
- Pavco-Giaccia, O., Fitch Little, M., Stanley, J. & Dunham, Y. (2019). Rationality is Gendered. Collabra: Psychology 5 (1): 54. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.274; Lloyd, G. (1979). The man of reason. Metaphilosophy, 10(1), 18-37. ↵
