 This is the first of three videos that will demonstrate the process of persuasion in several different ways here. In this video, we'll be focusing on the tools of motivation, but before we get into the detail of that, let's talk about where we're coming from. And that's the entomomatic persuasion philosophy that was first brought to us by our friend Aristotle. You may remember him from previous videos and previous discussions. He's a famous rhetorician and thinker in a variety of ways, but one of the things he did was really explore persuasion and look at some of the common modes of persuasion and especially the syllogism and say, you know, the syllogism is okay with his major premise and minor premise and then conclusion, but really that's not necessarily the most effective route to persuasion. He said, that's not really the best way to do things. So what he said is instead of the major premise, the minor premise and the conclusion, we skipped the major premise. We just leave it unstated as a persuader. We leave that unpersuaded and we let the audience supply what they think the major premise is so that we have that connection. I mean, really it's implied, it's we're inferring it, but we don't state it outright because it's just assumed it's something that we understand with the audience. And so what this helps us do though is then after we identify that common ground within that major premise without actually stating it, but we start to identify areas in that common ground. That really creates some co-creation of meaning between you and the audience because now you have this unstated bond, right, this unstated understanding of what you're talking about without even having to say anything that really creates that serious co-creation and connection and identification in the minds of the audience. So and really cements that in their mind. So all of this comes from, you know, it's what Aristotle called the enthememe, right? And so the enthemematic process of persuasion does that. It skips the major premise and it adapts the, it's kind of an adapted syllogism, but it goes beyond that even. So within that then in this video and the next couple of videos here, we're going to look at three different routes, three common routes of enthematic persuasion. The process premises will focus on the psychological factors of persuasion. And that's what we will cover in this video. The content premise, which we'll cover in a different video. The content premise that will emphasize logical or rational patterns and the cultural premises are rooted in the values, beliefs and behaviors passed down by the audience's culture or society. So that's what we're heading in this video in the next couple of videos. But in this video specifically, we will begin our discussion by looking at process premises and the tools of motivation in persuasion. So let's start with a couple of principles of process premises. So making sure we're on the same page here. First of all, we need to understand that most persuasion involves some degree of self persuasion. To a certain extent, we are persuading ourselves. We have to have buy in, we have to have understanding with the speaker, and we have to have agreement within ourselves. So we're persuading ourselves, a persuader can plant the seeds. But in the end, it is the individual that needs to actually enact that persuasion and internalize that persuasion. So most persuasion involves self persuasion. Also persuasion happens incrementally. It doesn't just usually happen like all at once. There's not literally, you know, or figuratively even a light bulb that goes off and all of a sudden you are just persuaded. You know, you hear one good argument and that's probably enough to change your mind. Usually that's not the case. Persuasion happens over time, incrementally as we hear things and we process things and we understand things and it happens slowly over time and little bits and pieces. We also need to understand that persuasion frequently involves a variety of appeals. It's sometimes needed to kind of put things in silos and say, you know, it's either emotional persuasion or logical persuasion or based on the credibility of the speaker or whatever. But really persuasion frequently involves effective persuasion involves a variety of those appeals, a mixture of those appeals. And it's not usually just one thing. So with that in mind, the process premises of persuasion, these tools of motivation involve persuasion that targets the psychological processes of an audience, targets their psychological processes in a variety of ways. That could be emotional. It could be logical. It could be, you know, a lot of different things, but we're targeting here the psychological process of the audience. So we start off, there are three different kind of three different things we're going to look at here. Three different processes that we're going to look at premises. So the first premise we're going to look at is the premise of need. And we're going to start our discussion here with Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which you may be familiar with. It's pretty common discussion point in a lot of different courses, communication courses, sociology, sociology courses, certainly psychology courses. A lot of different courses discuss Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So you may be familiar, but let me run through here just in case you're not. First of all, we start with it and Maslow created this kind of pyramid. And he said, really, that we need to address the things at the base of the pyramid and then move upward, that we won't be able to really address those higher level items, those higher level needs until we first address the lower level ones. So we start with physiological needs, just the basic needs that our body needs for survival. Okay, we're talking here about food and water and shelter to make sure that we have those things that we have enough to eat, that we have enough to drink, that we have a place to sleep, that we have warmth, that we can take care of ourselves, literally in that survival mode. So we need to meet first our physiological needs before we'll start worrying about other types of things. Once we have those needs met, then we'll move into what we call safety and security needs, right? Safety and security needs. Am I secure? Am I safe where I'm at? Not only have I met my body's most basic needs, but now do I have some sense of security, some sense of safety where I'm at? That's the next important need that we need to meet according to Maslow. So once we meet our physiological needs, then we can meet our safety and security needs, then we can move on up to love and belonging. We can be concerned with things like, am I in a loving relationship? Do I have a sense of belonging? Do I have a sense of being known by others and a desire to be known by others and a connection with those around me, whether that's my family, my friends, whatever? Then we can move on to this sense of love and belonging. But again, a reminder, we can't move into any of these higher phases until we're not going to worry about whether or not I'm in a loving relationship if I don't have enough to eat, or if I don't have anything to drink, if my body is suffering in that way, or if I don't feel safe, then I'm not really going to worry about those types of relationships, right? So once I've met those basic needs, though, then I move into these others. So that one is love and belonging. Once we have that one met, then we can start to think about self-esteem. How do I feel about myself? Do I feel good about myself? What do I need to do to feel good about myself? And then finally, once we've met that need, then we can get into what Maslow called self-actualization, really truly understanding ourselves, becoming sort of our best self, and really focusing on some internal things that are happening with this and the psychological thing. So as a persuader, we can look at these things, though. And say, where can I meet this audience? What am I trying to persuade them on? And where does that fit into Maslow's hierarchy here? Am I meeting the audience where they're at? If I'm addressing a group that doesn't have enough to eat and doesn't have enough to drink, are they going to be concerned with loving relationships? So should I be trying to emphasize that? Should I emphasize self-esteem if people don't already have safety and security and so forth, right? We need to understand these needs and be able to present people and persuade people based on the needs of where they are at right now. So that's one part of the psychological process we can understand. Also in needs, we could look at what we call Packard's hidden needs. This is based on research that was conducted by a man named Vance Packard back in the 60s. And he did this research on behalf of advertisers. When he published his conclusions, they were related to persuasion and psychoanalytics, which he determined lots of advertising agencies were using psychoanalytics at that time. So his published conclusions were related to persuasion, psychoanalytics, and consumer behavior specifically. And he developed what he called these hidden, these eight hidden needs, right? His research indicated and highlighted these eight hidden needs that are regularly used to appeal to the consumer and sell products in that way. So he identified though these eight categories of needs. So let's just take a look at each of these quickly here. The first hidden need that he identified was emotional security. And we can kind of see that in Maslow as well, right? That love and belong, but we need to feel like we are connected to something and someone. We need to have that sort of emotional security that sense of being secure with who we are. We need a reassurance of worth. We're looking for that reassurance of worth. That's a need that we have. We need somebody to reassure us that we are enough, that we are worthy, that we belong there, that we are desired. Also, ego gratification is a need that we have. We need, at times, people to stroke our egos, people to say nice things about us, people to build us up a little bit. That's a need that we have that a persuader can use to get through and psychologically reach an audience is to provide a little ego gratification. And then creative outlets. As society has grown, we've become more, again, talking about silos earlier, we've become more kind of silo oriented. We've become more, with mass production, used to be that one person would do everything. You would see a product through, if you were a craftsperson, you would see it through from beginning to end. When someone wanted a desk for their home, you would go find a carpenter and that carpenter would do everything related to building and creating and crafting that desk. But now we have mass production. So one person's only gonna be involved with putting the drawers together and not putting the whole frame together. And then another person down the line is gonna put the frame together. And then another person after that's gonna get the drawers and the frame and put them together. Another person's gonna be responsible for painting it and doing any finishing work like that. So we don't have as much creativity in our work. So one of the needs that we have is a way to scratch that creative itch because we still have that. We want to be creative. We just don't have the opportunity to do that as much in our occupational roles. So Packard said that we can meet a need and we can help identify and meet a need within an audience if we can find a way to help them fulfill those creative outlets and engage those creative outlets. So this is for four. There are four more here. The first is love objects. People get attached to things and these are needs. We have a need to care for these objects and need to see them through. So for example, you can take pet ownership. It used to be pets, we had a dog when I was a child that we would just feed whatever. We'd get these 25 pound bags of dog food and just the hard, crunchy kind and that's what she would eat. That's what she, she just ate whatever we could afford and whatever we would get her in that bag. But now people have this need to become attached to things especially if you're a parent, then it could be your child, right? But when you don't have children or if your children are grown and no longer need that kind of attention for it, we attach to different things. Now that could be different things. Like I said, pets are one. It used to be that you would just feed them whatever. Now because they are love objects because we can afford it and because we can need to buy them a healthy food. We need to buy them food straight from the farm or whatever, it's no longer just enough to have the crunchy nuggets for them. We gotta have this food that's mail ordered delivered to especially for that pet and especially formulated for our type of dog and things. But so we do things like that, but it doesn't have to be a pet. It could be a car that you really care about. It could be a home that you really care for. It could be any kind of project, that becomes the object of our affection becomes our love object. And so if persuader can find a way to connect with the love object of a particular audience, that can be a powerful tool for persuasion, tool for motivation. We can also tap into this sense of power as a persuader, this sense of power. We're always looking for more power, right? This is dating me a little bit back in, when home improvement was on TV, that was something Tim Taylor talked about, right? More power, need more power. So we always looking for more power and more sense of control in our life, more power in our life. And I'll tell you this, I'm not a motorcycle guy. I don't own a motorcycle and haven't ridden one regularly, but the couple of times that I've ridden a motorcycle or driven a motorcycle, it is pretty amazing to sit across that thing, to straddle that thing and start it up and just feel the rumble of that engine all the way through your body. And that is a sense of power. That is a sense of great power. I get the same thing. I haven't done this a lot either, but I get the same feeling from riding a horse in a sense, right? That there's just a sense of power there, the sense that you are controlling and that you have some sense of control over. So we're looking for this power, we're looking to harness more power and feel like we are in control of that more power. So as a persuader, that's something we can tap into. We can tap into the roots of something. We want roots. Now there's evidence to show that people move throughout their lives. Upwards of 10 times throughout their lives, people will change careers, not just jobs, but careers. Entire careers, perhaps four times throughout their lifetime. And that's a lot. And so we're also trying to find ways that we can become rooted to some place because we have this desire to be rooted somewhere, to have these roots put down roots, right? To have these roots and to stay loyal to something. That's the other thing. We want to find a brand that we can trust. There's a reason that we keep going back to these same brands over and over again. And there's a reason that I go to the same mechanic over and over again, even though this place is the shop is not necessarily the cheapest and they're not the fastest necessarily, but I know them. I trust them. I trust their word. I trust that when they tell me something is wrong with my vehicle, that that's what's wrong with it and that they're gonna be able to fix it. And if they're not, that they're gonna tell me, I'm not gonna be able to fix this and you need to take it somewhere else, right? So I keep going back there because I trust them. So we're looking for these roots, these things that we can be connected to, these things that we can be rooted to and say, I've been a customer of this for years. I've been a fan of this team for my entire life and so forth. That's why we don't, most people don't just jump from team to team, whoever's winning that season. We stick with that team. We desire that thing. So if we can tap into that as a persuader, that's another powerful motivation to them. And then finally for Packard's hidden needs, the sense of immortality, right? The sense of immortality and that we don't really believe that we're gonna die. I mean, we know in some respects that we're gonna die at some point, but we feel like we're gonna live on, that our legacy's gonna live on. We want that. We want our legacy to live on. We want our name to live on. We want all of this to live on, right? And so we have this sense of immortality that we're reaching for. So if we can tap into that, if we can persuade people that we have some avenue for that and that we have some understanding of what that is, then that's another hidden need. So anyway, these are ways that we can tap into people's needs, right? Through either Maslow, we can think about Maslow, we can think about Packard's hidden needs, and these identify different ways that we can reach an audience based on their needs, psychologically, right? So another premise that we have, though, in this process promises, the second one, the first one is needs. The second one is attitudes. We can reach people based on this need for attitudes, or through the process of attitudes, right? So first is attitudes and opinions, which affect one another a great deal, right? Our attitudes affect our opinions, our opinions affect our attitudes. So if we can tap into something related to opinions and connect in that way, then that'll give us something based on the attitude. We also need to understand the functions of attitudes. What do attitudes do? Well, there are three basic functions, cognitive, effective, and behavioral functions, right? First of all, attitudes affect how we think and how we think affects our attitudes, obviously. Again, those are interconnected, right? And they work both ways. But our attitudes will affect how we process information, how we think about things, how we view things, and vice versa, then how we think about things will affect our attitude about something. It also affect us emotionally. They affect our emotional reaction to things, and that's what we mean by affective. The affective function of attitudes is that they affect our emotions. How upset we get about something, and is based on our attitude toward that thing, right? Some things we are ultra concerned about. We're gonna get more worked up or have more emotions about that. Other things we don't have quite as much of an interest in or attitude about, so we don't get as worked up about those emotionally. And then behaviorally, our attitudes are gonna drive our behaviors as well, along those same lines. Our attitudes drive our behaviors. Attitudes and intentions is an interesting area. It essentially says that once we express an intention to do something, then our attitude toward that has been set, even before we've done that thing. Before we've done that thing, once we express an intention to do something, we feel so compelled to do that thing that it affects our attitude as though we have done it. So intention affects our attitudes, and vice versa as well. And we can tap into an audience there as well by getting them to state that they intend to do something or working into their intended behaviors. We can persuade an audience through those means. And then finally, we need to understand attitudes and information processing. First of all, what we're talking about here today is more in terms of attitudes is gonna be more related to the emotional connection. So for example, something like elaboration likelihood model that we have here. It says that when we come up against a decision, when we're really thinking about something, there's two different paths that this will take, either the high involvement processing or the low involvement processing. So the high involvement processing is what we call the central route. That's more attached to logical decisions and really we use that more with larger decisions. Are we gonna buy a new car? Are we gonna move somewhere? Are we gonna take a new job or not? Those are more high engagement things, high involvement processing. But what we're really talking about here is for most of what we've been talking about in terms of attitudes and things is the peripheral route, which is more attached to lower involvement processing, usually something more emotional or things. Which kind of candy bar should I eat? That's an example of that. Or what should I have for dinner tonight? That's not really life changing or earth chattering. There's low involvement processing and our attitudes are gonna affect that more and be affected more by that. And so in terms of persuasion, we need to understand where we're at on this level as well. So the premises we've looked at so far needs and attitude. And the last one, the third one that we're gonna look at as far as process is consistency, right? Consistency, humans have this kind of natural preference for equilibrium. We like things to just kind of remain even, not get too far out of whack. We have this, and the easiest way to achieve this is through homeostasis, is by doing the same things, by having predictability and being able to understand things and having the world really match up to what we think is going to happen and what we think should happen. That's when we get that consistency, right? When the world decides to veer outside of that though, we get what we call cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance theory, it basically says that this is when the mind is in a state of discomfort. And it's felt when we experience psychological tension because two or more modes of thought contradict each other. And so because these things contradict each other, we engage in tension reduction so that we can alleviate that discomfort. We don't want those two things to be in conflict, right? We don't want this battle in our mind here. We don't want this fighting going on with two things. The world's not doing what we think it should or not behaving the way we think it should. We saw this recently during the 2020 election when Joe Biden was elected president. He had a lot of cognitive dissonance for people who were part of the QAnon movement, right? Who were convinced that Biden, first of all, would not be elected and that he hadn't been elected, that it was a sham or whatever. And so especially around the inauguration, a lot of people say, well, it's not gonna happen. I mean, a minute before the inauguration, oh, this isn't gonna happen, this isn't real. And then when it happened, a lot of people saying, I don't understand how this is possible. They had a lot of cognitive dissonance because their belief in the core of their being was that this would not happen, right? So they engaged in tension reduction, came up with other things. Well, it wasn't a real inauguration. It was a sham inauguration that was constructed by, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. So, but you get the idea that they had some cognitive dissonance there and we experienced that a lot. When things aren't looking like we think they should and when people aren't doing what we think they should, we experience this cognitive dissonance, right? And so then we can think about this in terms of dissonance and consonance, right? Dissonance and consonance are the two things. Dissonance is when things aren't matching up. Consonance is when they are. So we have different sources for dissonance. We need to understand this as persuaders. There are different sources of dissonance and we can use these. I mean, we can create dissonance within our audience to try and motivate them toward some action or behavior, right? We can intentionally create this dissonance through, for example, loss of group prestige. You know, during the summer of 2020 during the after the George Floyd incident and the Black Lives Matters protests and things like that, there was a really kind of a loss of group prestige for police officers. I mean, during that summer, they had the George Floyd murder. You had Breonna Taylor shooting. You had the Amad Arbery shooting. You had all these things. While the Amad Arbery thing had nothing to do with police, the first two did and there were several others and that came to light and have been going on for years. So you really kind of had a loss of group prestige, fairly or unfairly. I mean, that's not to say that all police are bad or whatever, but people even who weren't as involved in that before all of a sudden are looking at the police like, yeah, it's kind of sketchy and I'm not so sure about this group. So the police experienced a loss of group prestige as a result there, right? You can create a source of dissonance or economic loss. This happens a lot in politics as well. You said, I mean, people are gonna lose their jobs. Everybody's gonna lose their jobs. All the jobs are going to China or Mexico or whatever. And so we create this panic about economic loss. If this person's elected, then the debt will be quadrupled or this and then it will affect interest rates and so forth. We create this dissonance. That's not what we want. We don't want economic loss. So it creates this dissonance and there are people who do that intentionally. We can persuade through the loss of personal prestige just like the loss of group prestige. We don't want that. So I had the loss of personal prestige talking about that as a source of dissonance. Uncertainty of prediction. Again, this whole thing is about what can I know about the world? What do I know and what do I expect to happen and is that matching up with my expectations when we can get to this uncertainty of prediction where people are no longer so sure. We had a massive dose of this after 9-11. And so up to that point, I mean, we'd had a couple of terrorist incidents in the United States. We had the Oklahoma City bombing. We had the bombing of the World Trade Center before that. And but, you know, those were sort of isolated in a sense. They weren't, they didn't affect us nationwide as much, but boy, 9-11 happened. And then all of a sudden it was, we were no longer insulated from terrorism. That was a huge mental shift for citizens in the United States. Before that we were kind of invincible terrorism attacks happen in other countries and not here, but now we don't know. Now we don't know what's gonna happen. Now we have to face the reality of we are no longer secure from that. So this uncertainty of prediction is something that we can see in persuasion as well. That we can create a situation where people are questioning whether they're, whether things are as certain as they think they are. And then a sense of guilt, you know, causes dissonance as well, right? We know that lying is bad and yet sometimes we've certainly lied, right? Big lies, small lies, whatever. We have this dissonance between lying as something bad people do, but I've lied. So am I a bad person? Is that dissonance in there? Can I justify it somehow, right? So we have a sense of guilt that we can utilize in some ways as a persuasion to create a persuasive argument as well to reach an audience. Then we also have sources of consonance. So dissonance, sources of dissonance are sources of creating that disconnect, that tension, that psychological tension, right? But sources of consonance are the opposite. They bring us, they reduce that tension for people and that's what we're working against cognitive dissonance as persuaders here. Things like a reassurance of security when we can help people understand that they are secure and help them feel secure. When we can provide a demonstration of predictability, right? In a sense, we're getting there almost with the weather. We think about that, you know, that's not 100% but we can certainly predict and anticipate and alert people more to major weather undertakings than we've ever been able to do before, right? So we can provide some predictability in the weather at least in predicting the forecast of that weather. And then finally, the use of rewards. I mean, people like rewards. So we can use those in creating some consonance as well. And reducing that tension really, that's the idea of all this is reducing that tension. So we talked about three promises that we can use as motivational tools, these tools of motivation. We talked about needs, we talked about attitudes and we talked about consistency, right? And using those tools, we can create this kind of psychological connection with the audience. We can use, you know, as Aristotle explained, we can create the entomeme, right? The entomeme that allows us to have that co-creation of meaning with the audience very strongly. So keep that in mind as you're moving forward as persuaders and learning more about persuaders and persuasion in general, that these are powerful tools of motivation. Now, remember, we need to maybe go back to our discussion on ethics and persuasion, right? You can go back and revisit that because these are very powerful tools. And so we wanna use them responsibly, but also understand that they're there and understand how we can best use those tools to help achieve our purpose as persuaders. If you have any questions, feel free to email me. I'm always happy to engage via email and hope to hear from you related to your persuasive efforts. And in the meantime, again, consider those tools of persuasion, consider how you can best use those as a persuader to achieve your purpose.