Wilson is preparing for a persuasive presentation. Wilson, who is passionate about reducing child-poverty, has volunteered for an organization that helps children escape poverty, and has done extensive research on the topic. Wilson has excellent data on how many children are affected by poverty, the many systemic causes of child-poverty around the globe, and how donating to or volunteering with the organization they volunteered with would be a very effective way to help to reduce child-poverty. By the time they finish getting all their data organized and writing the presentation, they feel really good about how strong their argument is. They ask their roommate to listen to the presentation.

As Wilson is delivering it, their roommate pays attention but seems disengaged. Afterward, their roommate simply says “It’s good… It makes sense to me.”

This is not the reaction Wilson was hoping for.

“You looked kind of bored… When I came home after volunteering and told you about it, you said you wanted to volunteer with me next summer. So, if this is boring for YOU, I’ve got to figure out how to improve it.”

“That was different,” their roommate says. “What made me want to volunteer was all the stories you told about the people you got to help. Like those two sisters who had to spend all day walking back and forth carrying water for their family, but your group built a well and now they get to go to school. I still think about that one sometimes.”

“Do you think I should tell that story in my presentation?” Wilson asks.

“Yes! It is such a good story, and it will help your audience really see what a good cause this is!”

 

Pathos describes persuasive appeals based in emotion. Aristotle (n.d.) recognized that, even when presented with the same evidence, people will make different judgments and reach different decisions depending upon the mood they are in at the moment. Knowing this, an effective speaker will pay attention to the emotional states of their audience and may even try to alter those states when necessary. Aristotle’s goal is not simply to manipulate audiences through their emotions. In fact, he argues that effective use of pathos can even prevent audiences from making wrong judgments due to bad emotions. The goal of pathos should be to put listeners in an emotional state that allows them to make the right decision and have the conviction to act on it. So, what does this look like in practice? How can you use pathos to be a more effective presenter? This chapter offers guidance on when and how to use pathos.

Pathos appeals are everywhere. We encounter them when companies try to sell us products. We are confronted with them during every election season. And we sometimes experience them in our interpersonal relationships at work and home. The reason is simple: they work.

Which emotions can be part of effective pathos appeals? Aristotle lists several, including anger, friendship, fear, shame, kindness, pity, indignation, envy, and emulation. But the list is even longer. This chapter discusses a few emotions commonly used for pathos appeals and offers some insights into how they can be used. However, any strong emotion can motivate listeners or make it easier to persuade them.

Anger

Anger is the feeling of resentment, and desire for justice, a person feels in response to actions, insults, or situations they believe are unjust. That last part is particularly important. We may not like an action or situation, but if we believe that others were fair and just in their actions, we are unlikely to be angry. However, if we believe harm was done to someone who did not deserve it, or people acted in a way that was unjust, we may feel anger. Anger is a powerful motivator. If you can convince your audience that people have been unjustly harmed, it becomes much easier to convince them to support action to address the situation and prevent it from continuing.

Joy

Joy can encompass a variety of positive emotions including happiness, satisfaction, or pride. In some circumstances, you may want to evoke future joy as a way to motivate your audience to work toward something. For example, in order to convince them to adopt good study habits, you might prompt a group of first year college students to think about how proud they and their families will feel when they graduate. Alternatively, you might evoke joy about the past or present. If you were speaking to a group of wealthy alumni from your university, you might ask them to remember the pride they felt when they graduated and ask them to donate scholarship money so that other people will have the opportunity to have that same feeling.

Compassion

Compassion is feeling sadness for the suffering of others and wanting to alleviate that suffering. A common strategy in persuasive speaking is to appeal to an audience’s compassion by describing the suffering of others and offering a solution that addresses it. In this way, a speaker can make abstract problems or issues much more concrete and real to an audience. Imagine opening a speech by saying that “619,000 people die of malaria each year.”  This statistic may or may not resonate with your audience. On the other hand, imagine you open by showing a picture of a smiling young child carrying an even smaller child on his shoulders. Then you say “This is Ali. He is the oldest of three children, loves taking care of his infant brother, and wants to be a doctor when he grows up. He recently turned five years old and talked every day about how excited he was to start school. Unfortunately, he was unable to. He contacted Malaria, and—because he did not have access to the necessary medicine—was bedridden and unable to attend school for months. Thankfully, Ali got the medicine he needed and has fully recovered. But 619,000 people a year are not so lucky. And more than 75% of them are children under the age of five.” This second version includes the same statistic, but it is far more likely to get your audience engaged because it makes the problem concrete to your audience and evokes compassion.

Fear

Fear is the feeling that a person, their friends/family, or their community is in danger. Appeals to fear are common in political discourse. We may be told to fear other people, the government, or countless other dangers of the future. Of course, some fears are more warranted than others. Public health campaigns often rely on fear appeals. For many years, anti-smoking advocates have run advertising campaigns that vividly depict the health risks of smoking. These include graphic images of severely damaged lungs, striking testimony from cancer survivors, or chalk outlines of how many people die from smoking each day. These advertising campaigns have contributed to a substantial reduction in smoking in the United States.

Shame and Guilt

Shame is the feeling of being disgraced to people we admire, and who we wish to have admire us. Social work professor Brené Brown (2012) makes a distinction between shame and guilt. She argues that shame is a belief about one’s quality as a person— that one is fundamentally unworthy of belonging with the people they want to belong with. Guilt, in contrast, is a feeling about how one acted in a particular moment— that one failed to live up to their values. Both can be powerful motivators, because they are both deeply uncomfortable emotional states. However, Brown argues that appeals to shame are likely to reduce social connections and should be avoided. Appeals to guilt, however, can be productive by focusing on specific behaviors and calling ourselves and others to live up to our ideals. She specifically discusses these kinds of emotional appeals in parenting, and notes that shame correlates with addiction, depression, and aggression, while guilt can prompt productive reflection on specific behaviors. Because both shame and guilt are such uncomfortable feelings, you should be very careful about using such appeals. It is probably best to only use guilt appeals, and only to audiences with whom you have built a strong connection. Being told that you have failed to live up to your values by a stranger is unlikely to be persuasive. However, if you believe that you and your audience share a connection and a deeply held conviction, noting how they have failed to live up to it—and calling them to do so—can make for a powerful persuasive appeal.

Pathos can be a powerful tool when trying to move others to action. However, it is probably the easiest of the three types of appeals to misuse in ways that render it ineffective or unethical. To use pathos well, you should follow three rules: 1) Be concrete, 2) Be selective, and 3) Be ethical.

Be Concrete

Being concrete means making your use of pathos feel as real and specific as possible. Consider the example from the introduction. Although Wilson wanted to motivate their listeners to help all children living in poverty, describing the various challenges such children might face is less likely to evoke a strong emotional response than a concrete and detailed representation of the challenges faced by specific children. One simple way to make your pathos appeals concrete is through storytelling. Tell the story of a specific child. What do they have to do every day because of their poverty? What hard choices do they have to make? What does your audience take for granted that this child lives without?

Another way is to make these appeals visual. Images can make your emotional appeals more real and present in the minds of your audience (Langer, 1996). In addition to telling a story, show a photograph. The image could depict children navigating some of the challenges described in the story. But even seeing a picture of her smiling with her siblings makes the rest of the story more real.

 

Be Selective

Pick the moments you use pathos carefully. It is easy to overuse pathos appeals, and using them too frequently can undermine their impact. People can only feel strong emotions for so long, and about so many things, before they lose their intensity. If you make too many emotional appeals, your audience will begin to feel like you are trying to emotionally manipulate them. This will make them less likely to trust you and can greatly undermine your ethos.

Where might you use them in a speech? First, a story with strong emotional resonance can sometimes be a very effective way to open and conclude your speech. It can not only create immediate interest in your topic, in a way facts or statistics may not, but it can also help put your listeners in the right emotional state right from the start of the speech. Second, you might couple pathos with logos by adding pathos appeals in places where you think your logical arguments might be too dry or abstract. This is why anti-smoking campaigns are such good examples of pathos: rather than simply providing data on the strong statistical link between smoking and various health problems, they supplement those logical arguments with vivid depictions of what those health problems look and feel like. Finally, pathos can be particularly useful when the consequences you are advocating for or against are far away in time or distance. On issues like smoking or climate change, the dangers may seem uncertain or distant enough that motivating people to act is difficult. In such situations, pathos can be a powerful persuasive tool.

Be Ethical

Finally, it is important to use pathos ethically. Three important rules to follow are 1) Don’t use pathos to manipulate audiences into acting in ways they normally would never wish to act, 2) represent others honestly and consensually, and 3) use pathos to support, not replace, logical arguments.

One of the oldest concerns about rhetoric and persuasion is that they would be used to inflame the emotions of an audience and cause them to act in ways they normally would not want to act. This is a real danger, and you should actively avoid using pathos in this way. Aristotle noted, for example, how people actually LIKEbeing angry and feeling like they are justified in punishing those who deserve it. This misuse of pathos based in anger and fear has led to countless examples of mob and vigilante violence: from historical incidents such as the Salem Witch Trials and the Red Scare, to more recent examples such as violence against innocent Muslim-Americans after the 9/11 attacks and Asian-Americans in response to Covid-19. Using pathos ethically means not inflaming emotions in a way that allows them to indulge their worst impulses. Rather, you should use pathos to give your audience extra motivation act as the best version of themselves.

Second, if you are telling others’ stories, do so honestly and (when possible) consensually. If their story does not quite work for your speech, you can always find a different one or even present a hypothetical story. But, if you are telling a real person’s story, you owe it to them and your audience to tell the truth. If the person is someone you actually know, it is usually best to ask for their permission to tell their story or use their image.

Finally, Aristotle argued pathos should be used to support logical arguments, and to prepare an audience to respond to them, not to overrule our logical faculties. Of course, it is possible to make logical arguments for unethical actions. But if you know your audience would not accept your logical arguments, so you find yourself using emotional appeals to get a person to do something, you should stop and consider if you are attempting to manipulate them. Basing your argument in strong logic not only reduces the likelihood that you are just manipulating your audience, it also makes you more persuasive. If you provide both a strong logical argument for why they should act, and you support it by creating an emotional response in your audience, you are far more likely to persuade your audience.

Pathos can be an incredibly powerful tool to persuade your audience. Emotions like anger, joy, compassion, fear, or guilt can be powerful motivators. Pathos appeals can help put listeners in an emotional state that allows them to make the right decision and have the conviction to act on it. You can be most effective in your use of pathos by being concrete, selective, and ethical. However, it is unlikely you can persuade your audience in a meaningful and long-lasting way using pathos alone. Evoking strong emotions in your audience may prime them to act, but you also need to convince them of the right action to take.

This highlights an important aspect of ethos, logos, and pathos appeals: they can, and should, be used together. Using pathos alone may create a desire to act, but leave your audience unsure how or why to act. If you only use logos, you may be frustrated to find that—despite having strong evidence and logic—your audience grows bored or simply does not care enough to act. Without establishing ethos, your audience may not even listen to what you have to say. Even if you do an excellent job establishing your credibility, you may still have a hard time persuading your audience simply based on their trust in you. But if your audience perceives you as a knowledgeable and trustworthy speaker, presenting a strong logical argument that resonates with them emotionally, they are likely to find you very persuasive.