Persuasive Arguments Appeal to Emotions

Facts don’t care about feelings. It’s an appealing idea: truth is truth, whether or not we want to believe it.

From this thought follows the equally appealing idea that debate is an inherently rational activity. It’s about following the facts and accepting the better argument – the argument that best fits the evidence.

Yet, for Aristotle, a persuasive speech has three modes. The first is ethos – the Greek word for “character.” Ethos in this context concerns the credibility of a person.

The second is pathos or “emotion” the attempt to sway an audience by appealing to powerful emotions such as love and fear.

Finally, there’s logos or reasoning. This form of persuasion deals in facts and figures.

In contemporary debates, it’s usually logos that’s asked to do the heavy lifting. That makes sense: we extol facts and figures, data and statistics, because we want our arguments to be rooted in truth. In an ideal world, the evidence would do its own talking.

But that’s rarely how public debates play out. In the real world, logically unassailable arguments fall short and leave audiences cold.

People are stubborn. Reactive. Overconfident. Afraid of change. More importantly, they’re emotionally invested in beliefs, ideas, and ideals.

That adage, then, has it back to front: often enough, it’s our feelings which don’t care about the facts.

For self-avowed rationalists, the issue is simple: we’ve forgotten how to reason properly. If we trained ourselves to think more dispassionately, public debates would become more rational. 

That view assumes that reason and emotion are separate – and contradictory – things. But research into human cognition has called that assumption into question.

As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio summarizes the findings of this new research, humans are neither thinking nor feeling machines, but “feeling machines that think.”

In his acclaimed book Descartes’ Error, Damasio looks at people who’ve suffered damage to the part of the brain which handles emotional processing – the prefrontal cortex.

At first glance, these people seemed to be reasoning machines: theirs was a black-and-white world of pure logic in which the fuzzy gray tones of emotions had disappeared.

Being unemotional, though, didn’t make them more rational. Instead, they became “uninvolved spectators” in their own lives who struggled to assign different values to different options.

They could know, but they couldn’t feel. Reason, Damasio concludes, isn’t a standalone faculty. Without feelings, our decision-making landscape becomes “hopelessly flat.”

In short, to make rational decisions we need a jolt of emotion. 

What does that have to do with winning arguments?

In a word, everything. To win an argument, you have to get your listeners to make a decision – they have to choose you over your opponent.

If neuroscientists like Damasio are right and the heart leads the head, pure logos won’t cut it: you also have to appeal to listeners’ feelings.

This isn’t about jettisoning reason and simply saying what people want to hear.

The point, here, is that audiences may only accept better, more truthful arguments once the person making them has established an emotional connection.

Put differently, pathos may be the best vehicle to deliver logos.