Humor and Satire

Kennedy's use of humor was memorable: One of his best known quips was his opening remark to an audience at SHAPE headquarters in Paris in 1961: "I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself to this audience. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris and I have enjoyed it." We have already touched on the subject of humor in our discussion of credibility. We saw that although humor affects whether an audience likes a speaker, it may not influence the speaker's perceived expertness. And yet, as they prepare their speeches, there is no doubt that the majority of speakers are scrupulous about including humorous elements. Even if the subject is one of great urgency, there will often be at least some effort to win over the audience with a joke or two. In fact, opening a speech with a joke is a frequent practice and is often recommended in handbooks on public speaking. Reportedly, one of Gerald Ford's speech writers was concerned solely with the writing of humorous material.

Empirical research does not justify such concern with the use of humor. An early study indicated that whether a speech had humor in it did not influence whether it was perceived as either interesting or persuasive (Lull, 1940). And an often-cited study showed that although many of the subjects enjoyed a speaker's use of humorous exaggeration—the speech in this experiment satirized the value of censorship—the satiric message was not at all persuasive. Indeed, many people missed the point of the satire (Gruner, 1965). It may be that satire fails to persuade because the thesis of the speaker's argument is concealed. Presumably, for the audience the value of the satire will be its humorous aspects. Gruner explains that "if the speaker succeeds as a satirist, he is likely to be too indirect for the audience to grasp his thesis; but if he is direct enough for his thesis to be plain, he no longer is humorous" (p. 153).

Appeals to Fear

You want to persuade your audience that driving without safety belts is dangerous, that smoking can cause cancer, that disarmament will be detrimental to national security. What should your strategy be? Is the audience more likely to be persuaded if you appeal to fear? And if so, what level of fear is optimal?

There have been a number of studies examining the relationship between fear and attitude change. The original research, on dental hygiene, found that the higher the level of fear arousal, the less attitude change took place 0anis and Feshbach, 1953). This is an appealing conclusion; none of us wants to feel vulnerable to persuasive "attacks" based on fear. We like to think, for example, that we are immune to all the television commercials that promote a product by playing on our fear of being unpopular, unattractive, or even offensive to others. But the question turns out to be more complex. Many researchers report a strong positive correlation between fear arousal and attitude change. For example, under high-fear conditions students urged to get tetanus inoculations showed significantly greater attitude change than those given the same advice under low-fear conditions. High-fear conditions resulted in more behavior change as well: more students did get tetanus shots (Dabbs and Leventhal, 1966).

How do we reconcile these apparently contradictory results? One theory (McGuire,_1968) supported by much recent evidence, suggests that the relationship between fear and attitude change takes the form of an inverted U curve. According to this theory low fear arousal results in little attitude change, presumably because the level is so low that the listener gives the message no special attention. As the level increases to the intermediate range, attitude change also increases. This is the optimal range for persuasive communication. Once the level of fear becomes extremely high, attitude change declines sharply because the listener responds defensively to the message, which interferes with message reception. Suppose, for example, that while lecturing on the harmful effects of smoking, a speaker goes into a painfully detailed description of emphysema and then shows her audience photographs of patients with terminal lung cancer. It is very likely that her listeners will become so anxious that they have to block out the message entirely, so that the speaker's efforts at persuasion then become self-defeating.

We do know that when a source has high credibility a strong appeal to fear will be more persuasive than a mild appeal to fear (Miller and Hewgill, 1966). For example, if the speaker lecturing on the harmful effects of smoking is a doctor, her strong appeal to fear is likely to induce more attitude change among her listeners than it would if she were a woman with no medical training who had given up smoking.

Personality variables will also influence the effectiveness of fear appeals. For example, dogmatic people tend to be more anxious and insecure than people who are open-minded. An extremely dogmatic person tends to evaluate a message in terms of its source rather than its content. Thus, for some, a clergyman's strong appeal to fear about the dangers of smoking may be much more persuasive than a doctor's speech. Source credibility will depend of the belief system of the receiver.

There are so many other variables influencing persuasion that, given the incomplete state of present-day research, it is still too soon to make definitive statements about how effective appeals to fear will be in public communication.

How Much Change To Attempt

Confrontation is a persuasive style that has come to dominate numerous public communication contexts. The use of this strategy brings up an important question: Assuming that the speaker is interested in maximum persuasion, how much change should he or she argue for?

Let us explain the question by giving an example. Suppose the issue under discussion is whether or not the federal government should provide welfare benefits for the unemployed. Let the continuum in Figure 10.4 represent the range of opinion on this issue, and let us assume that there are 100 possible attitudes. Suppose Greg's preferred position on welfare can be quantified at 65. Surrounding this point on the scale is a range of opinions that Greg also finds acceptable, sometimes referred to as his latitude of acceptance. Beyond this point is a latitude of noncommitment and, finally, a latitude of rejection, a range of opinions that he finds unacceptable. Imagine that Greg's latitude of acceptance goes from 50 to 75. If the speaker advocates a position within this range—55, for example—the discrepancy between this view and Greg's favored position is relatively small. Researchers have found that, other things being equal, such a moderate discrepancy will tend to shift listener attitude toward the position advocated by the speaker (Hovland et al., 1953). That is, the listener tends to perceive the speaker's position as closer to his or her preferred position than it really is; in fact, the listener tends to assimilate, or accept, the change in attitude urged by the speaker. This phenomenon is often referred to as an assimilation effect.

In the hope of bringing about maximum attitude change, the speaker may, of course, advocate a position that falls within the listener's latitude of rejection. This is the rationale behind confrontation tactics. But the results have often been disappointing. Research has shown that when a message falls within the latitude of rejection, the listener tends to perceive the message as even more discrepant with his or her viewpoint than it actually is and therefore to reject it. Thus, instead of producing greater attitude change, the speaker elicits a negative reaction on the part of the listener that has variously been referred to as a backlash, boomerang effect, or contrast effect.

Bear in mind that the more deeply committed you are to your system of beliefs or to a given position, the narrower your latitude of acceptance will be. Thus, in trying to persuade listeners whose minds are fairly well made up, a speaker should advocate a relatively moderate amount of change to produce the optimum reaction.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 900