As we begin our work on persuasion, I'd like to start with a few definition. So, what does it mean to be persuasive? Now, we might provisionally define persuasion as the deliberate attempt to affect audience beliefs and behaviors through communication. So persuasions does deliberate it's not accidental, and persuasion has audiences in mind. So our goal is to move them in some type of way, to change behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, whatever. This means that the listener has free choice. At a basic level, we don't persuade people, they persuade themselves. We just kind of clear the pathway for them. You can't really force anyone to be persuaded. Persuasion and force are fundamentally different. So a mugger who pulls a gun on me and says give me your wallet, he's not persuasive. Is he influential? My, yes. He's going to get that wallet, done and done. But I didn't want to give him my wallet, and I wasn't persuaded to do so. I was forced, and that's not persuasion. By the same token, persuasion's not simply a manipulation or coercion. So in manipulation, someone deceitfully preys upon the weaknesses of another or actively deceives them. So if a used car salesman lies to me about the mileage on a car, that's not persuading, that's just not true. Now persuasion and influence are similar, but they're not quite the same thing. Influence is this really big category. And on one side of influence, we've got stuff like persuasion. And on the other side of influence, we've got stuff like coercion. And then we've got this mad vast middle, and we got a bunch of influential factors in there, stuff like culture, and history, and modeling. As a matter of fact, if you want to be influential, there is one thing that you can do that will significantly improve your effectiveness every time. One thing, just one thing. What's that one thing? Be attractive, be a physically attractive person. Research has time and time again reinforce attractiveness is influential. Now, if you are like me, that strategy ain't really a viable one, right? No one looks at me and is like, I really don't buy his argument, but look at him, he's just what I want in a man. He's like an egg, but paler, sunny side up. So what we'll do is were going to talk about some of the research on influence. And it's important to know what those factors are, but we're focusing more on persuasion instead of influence. So, that's some general ideas. And I'd say finally, we're working within the medium of speech. Persuasion and influence can operate in different mediums differently. So propaganda, for example, aims to have multiple messages repeating key themes over months and years on a wide range of medium, print, television, speeches, so on and so forth. And this is why propaganda's so scary, it's all-encompassing. Now, a speech has a narrower scope. We generally need to make the case in a single talk, or maybe a couple of talks. And we're using primarily oral means. Now, oral persuasion can be hugely influential. The ancient rhetorician Gorgias likened it to drugs. He said, speech is a powerful lord that with the smallest and most invisible body accomplishes most god-like works. Some speeches cause pain, some pleasure, some fear; some instill courage, and some drug and bewitch the soul with a kind of evil persuasion. Now that raises the question of ethics. The ethics of persuasion have always been a bit sticky. Persuasion is a tool. It depends on its user, and I like Aristotle's response here. He wrote, there's no shame in defending yourself from a physical assault. Why should there be shame in defending yourself from a verbal one? So in this class, we'll focus on deliberately crafting messages that openly and honestly attempt to effect audience change. That means, we have to understand our argument deeply, and then think about how to adapt it to the needs and concerns of our audience. [MUSIC]