Verbal Persuasion and Body Language

Advertisers have many techniques for making their product appeal to customers. There are two main ideas behind this; one is the the central route persuasion and the other is the peripheral route persuasion. The first one usually applies to logic and focuses mainly on the specific attributes the product has. It generally helps when making a large purchase such as a car or an electronic device.

A cult, also known as a new religious movement, is defined as an exclusive group of individuals who come together to follow a leader's extreme ideas. A cult holds three general characteristics which include: being led by a charismatic leader, has radical beliefs and rituals compared to the norm, and isolates its members from their society to protect them from “evil”. The Unification Church, short for The Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity, is a cult that began in 1954 and was founded by Sun Myung Moon. Moon believed Jesus appeared to him when he was a teenager and told him he was carefully chosen to continue the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. He was told that Jesus himself had begun this mission before his death,

Body language (the process of communicating nonverbally through conscious or unconscious gestures and movements). People all of the world use body language or gestures to communicate nonverbally. I personally think that nonverbal communication and body language are one of the biggest barriers in communication especially between one culture to other. Body gestures can be misinterpreted as rude or disrespectful depending on the country, region, or even the city you’re from.

1. What primary persuasive message do you explore your current draft of your strategic rationale? Who are your main detractors or naysayers? Who would take issue with your PSA? Who would be skeptical of your PSA and why would they be skeptical? How are you building a subtle or direct rebuttal for skeptics and detractors into your PSA?

While communication across cultures relies on speech to convey the messages of those living in the same society, usually the unspoken language has a larger role to play in delivering these messages. Similar to the country’s language being specific to the region it surfaces from, body language and facial expressions also have individual characteristics within a particular region. There are shared attributes of nonverbal communication across the world but these are commonly divided into high and low context cultures. This results from different cultural beliefs and attitudes within such societies and impact on the social norms of communication. In Japan, the citizens communicate with actions and gestures to a larger percent in comparison to their speech, as they are able to understand each other’s meaning without additional words. Due to it being a high context culture Japan relies heavily on its nonverbal communication for its society to function efficiently and for adequate comprehension to be achieved.

* Dr. Cialdini explained that commitments are more powerful when they are active; public; effortful; and viewed as internally motivated. The statement of the commentator is accurate because the motorcycle owners had made their commitment public by tattooing their commitment on their

Robert Cialdini is the author of “Harnessing the Science of Persuasion.” Persuasion is the act of convincing other people to do and accept something as true. Throughout his article he discusses principles that influence people in the real world to do or believe. The six influencing principles Cialdini discusses are liking, reciprocity, social proof, consistency, authority, and scarcity. The influence of liking is defined as “People like those who like them” (Cialdini 209). This means someone that you are friendly with can be easily convinced by you. Reciprocity is best known as “People repay in kind” (210). An example of this is believing a male should open the door for a female, which in turn reciprocates to women also holding doors. The

Any communication interaction involves two major components in terms of how people are perceived: verbal, or what words are spoken and nonverbal, the cues such as facial expressions, posture, verbal intonations, and other body gestures. Many people believe it is their words that convey the primary messages but it is really their nonverbal cues. The hypothesis for this research paper was: facial expressions directly impact how a person is perceived. A brief literature search confirmed this hypothesis.

The company Sensational Salsa paid individuals to lie on a Facebook page about their product being delicious when in fact people did not enjoy it, this influenced people through both central and peripheral routes of persuasion. The individuals who posted the false reviews also began to buy the salsa, due to cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance, central, and peripheral routes to persuasion are all extremely effective in getting listeners to agree with their message.

The spoken language, while endlessly useful, is only a recent invention in comparison to body language. Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s often quoted study found that 7% of a message is conveyed through words, 38% through vocal elements, and 55% through nonverbal elements. While these statistics and their meanings may not be so straightforward, the overall take away is clear; nonverbal communication heavily affects the way we receive and transmit messages.

Communication extends far past the act of speaking. From the time we are born, we communicate with the people around us without having language as a medium. Instead, babies convey their thoughts, emotions, wants, and needs with their face and body. As babies turn into children, and children into adults, this facet of communication is marginalized and “body language” seems to become something far less important than spoken language. Subconsciously, however, the ways other’s bodies and faces are held have a great impact on the way people interpret words. One nuanced aspect of body language is behavioral mimicry’s place in forming bonds between people. This paper will discuss the effects, and a potential application, of unconscious mirroring and mimicking in social interactions. To clarify any confusion, usage of “mirroring” and “mimicking” are synonymous throughout the paper.

Body language, while easily overlooked as a means of communication, is used every day when people interact with one another. We interact beyond words by using what we call nonverbal signals. According to many experts in this field, such as James C. McCroskey and Virginia P. Richmond, the authors of Nonverbal Behavior in Interpersonal Relations, body language makes a huge difference in our daily communication. For example, the way we pose, the expressions on our face, and even the tone of our speech, which are all nonverbal communication methods, change the volume of speech and thus have various impacts on the overall communication. Almost half of our communications involves people’s use of body language to convey their thoughts, whether or not those happen unconsciously or consciously; understanding body language is very important for daily communication with one another. Since Eastern University is a small Christian college, students and professors have the opportunity to have better and intimate relationships with each other. Therefore, professors should not only use more efficient body languages to interact with students individually but also use various types of body language to improve class atmosphere. Furthermore, the use of body language can help international students have a better understanding of the American education system.

The idea of persuasion is something that has transitioned through the ages as a form of getting more support and other individuals on your side. Upon reading chapter 3 I now understand the different varieties of persuasion, when referring to writing. First of, the idea that a single topic can have a variety of different point of views or simply referring to the text as different angles of vision. When I think of different angles of vision it instantly transports me to the various audiences that an author could be trying to persuade. For example if I as a writer where trying to persuade individuals who care and worship the environment to believe in deforestation because of the numerous amount of benefits it could bring to others, they simply might not agree with me and it would be a long process to make them think otherwise. Also, The value of a photograph in a way reminds me of the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”.

There are three key modes of persuasion or rhetorical methods used in forming an argument - ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos, the Greek word meaning “character”, is an appeal to the author’s credibility; logos, the Greek word meaning “logic”, is an appeal to the audience’s judgement; pathos, the Greek word meaning “emotion”, is an appeal to the audience’s personal thoughts and biases. There are many ways these methods can be implemented, but not all works make use of them all. We can study the implementation of specific methods, in this example, the use of ethos, through examining their use in various works, such as Pavel Zemliansky’s “Methods of Discovery”.

With the above-listed information, I strongly believe that I would have adequate material facts to form a theory, opinion, and make a constructive recommendation without hesitance. Nevertheless, I must prepare to be flexible and courage to take alternative approaches to fit the unknown circumstances or unpredictable causes beyond my cautious estimation and control. As a person known to be a pioneer in visionary thinking and decisive in action, I must ultimately be courageous to bear responsibility concerning my recommendation.