The Neuroscience of Multimodal Persuasive Messages

Persuading the Brain

Dirk Remley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351796675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

In this book, Dirk Remley applies his model of integrating multimodal rhetorical theory and multi-sensory neural processing theory pertaining to cognition and learning to multimodal persuasive messages. Using existing theories from multimodal rhetoric and specific findings from neurobiological studies, the book shows possible applications of the model through case studies related to persuasive messages such as those found in political campaign advertising, legal scenarios and general advertising, including print, videos, and in-person settings. As such, the book furthers the discussion of cognitive neuroscience and multimodal rhetorical theory, and it serves as a vehicle by which readers can better understand the links between multimodal rhetoric and cognitive neuroscience associated with persuasive communication in professional and educational environments.

1 Persuasive Rhetoric and the Brain

Rhetorical Choices in Multimodal Persuasion

Why are politicians always smiling in political campaign advertisements? Why are adorable babies included in such photographs and photo-opportunities? Why do candidates seem to integrate the ugliest photo of their opponent while using black and white for the photo instead of color? Why do advertisers seem to integrate babies in advertisements for products or services that have no relationship to babies, such as in vehicle ads? Why do automobile manufacturers use attractive men, women, and families in their advertisements when they are trying to sell a vehicle? All of these are rhetorical choices marketers make in an effort to persuade the viewer toward certain action. Marketers know that nothing is included or excluded from a commercial accidentally; everything in the commercial or advertisement is there for a reason. Answers to all of these questions are easily found in scholarship related to the neuroscience of persuasion and the rhetoric of persuasion. This book attempts to mix the two sets of scholarship toward a unifying theory of persuasive multimodal rhetoric and practice.

To do this I use a model I introduced in another book, How the Brain Processes Multimodal Technical Instructions, refining that model and advancing its application. The model combined neuroscience scholarship with scholarship about multimodal rhetoric and instructions and cognition. Cognition is generally defined to include perception and understanding of the world as well as learning and comprehension. Persuasion involves one’s perception of a given situation; so, this book considers persuasion relative to an audience’s perception.

Politicians have consultants to help them plan their political messages for the best rhetorical effect. Marketers look for any means by which to persuade an audience toward action, and there is a growing body of research on how certain rhetorical choices affect audiences’ perception, right down to the color of a product or facial expression of a child in the commercial or advertisement. Attorneys who are involved with court proceedings and jury trials also have a body of research upon which to draw to understand who their jury, or audience, is. An attorney must understand as much of the demographic and psychographic makeup of a given jury pool as possible. Many attorneys will encourage clients to settle out of court and avoid trial, because an out-of-court settlement may be more favorable than the outcome of a jury trial on the issue. Attorneys can negotiate a reasonable settlement based on an understanding of the details of the case and the history of outcomes of litigation related to similar cases in the particular county.

One can make a reasonable guess as to the outcome of a trial; but one cannot guarantee the outcome of any trial, because a jury involves so many individuals and their own perceptions of an issue. Even Aristotle labelled rhetoric as an art rather than a science. If something is considered a science one can predict a specific outcome of a combination of materials related to that something; science is consistent, objective, and rational. Two plus two equals four; always and in any condition. If something is an art, one understands that the perception of that something may differ across individuals—as the idiom states, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” As another idiom states, “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

Rhetoric may be considered an art, but it is influenced by science. While pointing to rhetoric as an art, Aristotle made the connection between rhetoric and biology (Aristotle, translated 1991). A growing body of scholarship in cognitive neuroscience is helping politicians, marketers, and attorneys understand why certain messages and how they are presented affect an audience a certain way. All attempt to use a combination of stimuli to affect an audience’s perception of a message; that is why it is important to consider neuroscientific attributes that are involved in multimodal persuasive messages, which is the goal of this book.

Theories about multimodal composition continue to thrive as technology changes provide more access to various modes of representation for audiences and improved quality. Video is now integrated within websites effortlessly, and improving Internet access speeds make viewing video less arduous than before. While advertisers have been placing video commercials online for some time, many companies are now placing video reports and other multimodal messages online. Simons and Jones (2011) allude to some attributes of a persuasive message that may be multimodal in nature, referring to neural processes involved. Specifically, they consider the roles images can play in affecting an audience’s perception of an object or person, and they encourage integrating the full range of resources and tools humans have to communicate (p. 124).

This book attempts to make the connections between these rhetorical choices and a growing understanding of neuroscience explicit by linking the different disciplinary fields using concepts familiar to both but that are not explicitly stated in the literature. As I indicated in How the Brain Processes Multimodal Technical Instructions (HTB), I do this for two reasons: 1) in an effort to help students and professionals understand these connections better toward encouraging faculty and practitioners across various disciplines, including business, communication, and law, to implement this information to help facilitate learning and application of persuasive rhetoric, especially within multimodal settings such as commercials, videos, oral presentations, and even business or technical proposals that integrate graphics; and 2) to link rhetoric further within the growing STEM education tradition that seems to emphasize science and math education over humanities, thereby showing the relevance of rhetoric in this educational approach as I did in that previous book (Remley, 2015).

In this chapter, I provide an overview of the literature in neuroscience, which I will integrate throughout the book. I also introduce connections between rhetoric and neuroscience, laying a foundation on which to build a model of persuasive rhetoric that integrates elements of neuroscience. Some of this is a review from HTB, but I link it to persuasive rhetoric instead of instruction and learning.

Theoretical Bases

Neurobiologists Calvert, Spence, and Stein (2004) note that, because the scholarship related to neuroscience is “spread across multiple disciplines, it has become increasingly fragmented in recent years” (p. xii). However, in a special issue of Technical Communication Quarterly, Rivers (2011) encourages a multidisciplinary approach to research into cognitive science, recognizing the roles that biology and social environment as well as technology play in cognition. Alluding to the convergence of tools, environment, and brain in distributed cognition, he states that, “those tools and that world are always part of the mind itself” (p. 415).

The field of social semiotics, further, recognizes that meaning is a social construct; that is, one’s interpretation of various images and objects evolves through interactions with others. The cognitive experience is rhetorical and social. As I detailed in a previous book, we learn about new concepts by interacting with phenomena associated with the new concepts; however, it also applies to persuasion. One may provide information to us in a way that will help us to understand a new concept or convince us to take a different position than one we originally hold; this is both a social phenomenon—interaction with another, and it is rhetorical—a message is provided to an audience (us) with a particular purpose. It takes interaction with the world around us to comprehend a situation and the meaning of the information provided. However, even Aristotle noted a biological attribute to rhetoric. Cognitive science, generally, recognizes these attributes of cognition—social and biological attributes related to facilitating an understanding of our world. However, the discussion of these cognitive neuroscience dynamics is complicated by disciplinary discourses and exclusions.

I called attention previously to the fact that each discipline approaches the topic from its own angle, recognizing that literature from that field is needed to support such scholarship (2015). For example, rarely will the author of a scholarly article cite work from outside their own discipline or the discipline of the particular journal. This extends to scholarly books, too. For example, in his highly regarded book Cognition in the Wild, Hutchins (1996) limits the discussion of cognition and social semiotics to cognitive psychology and distributed knowledge theory. Also, in How the Mind Works, another highly regarded work of cognitive neuroscience, Pinker (1997) integrates some discussion of neuroscience on cognitive processes; however, he focuses on historical development of cognitive processes and psychological evolution. Finally, Gruber (2012) highlights discourse differences in how scholars treat the neuro-scientific concept of mirror neurons, neurons that help an audience interpret and copy behavior they view. Such discourse exclusion limits the lens through which studies examine the phenomena. However, the phenomenon itself is very much a part of the principles of social discourse and persuasive rhetoric; one must use an audience’s expectations and values to make an argument or persuade, and using discourse from one’s own field helps to make a particularly scholarly case because the audience expects it and values it accordingly.

Rhetoric, in a broad sense, examines how the way information is presented affects an audience’s understanding of that information and response to it. Aristotle (translated 1991) and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) recognized that rhetoric considers the disposition of certain kinds of audiences and one who wishes to convey an effective message must adjust to their particular audience. Aristotle acknowledges that rhetoric includes “three factors—the speaker, the subject and the listener—and it is to the last of these that its purpose it intended” (p. 80). The purpose of a message and its audience are intertwined. The message must consider the audience’s disposition in order to accomplish its purpose. This disposition can be theorized relative to social disposition or biological/physical disposition. Indeed, Aristotle notes that this likely involves an audience that may have “limited intellectual scope and limited capacity to follow an extended chain of reasoning” (p. 76). Such a statement includes physiological attributes in the rhetoric equation. If the audience’s cognitive capacities are not considered in developing the message, the meaning of the message will be lost.

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca recall this emphasis on the audience, pointing out that “it is in terms of an audience that an argumentation develops” (p. 5). Indeed, they compare one who does not consider the audience to a rude visitor (p. 17). They assert that the most important rule of rhetoric is to adapt the message to the audience (p. 25). A message is not automatically understood just because it is articulated; it must be conveyed in a way that suits the audience’s background and understandings, their experiences and practices; their capacity for cognition.

Scholarship in rhetoric draws on studies from the social science and humanities disciplines of cognitive neuroscience—social semiotics, social psychology, and language theories. Rhetoric is certainly a social dynamic. However, rhetoric has been left out of much of the discussion of cognitive neuroscience and is not considered amongst those fields.

Jack (2012) provides some introductory material for connecting rhetoric with biological fields of neuroscience in her edited collection about “neurorhetorics.” Jack and Appelbaum (2010) identify two approaches to “neurorhetoric.” One involves studying the rhetoric of neuroscience, in which one considers how different discourses treat neuroscientific scholarship. Gruber (2012), for example, takes the first approach and describes the discourse differences related to how different fields treat a particular concept of neuroscience—the concept of “mirror neurons.” He observes that institutional dynamics at work within disciplinary scholarship limit the ability to arrive at a common language to describe the concept, further illustrating this problem. Jack and Applebaum (2010) also state that,

[a] second approach might be the neuroscience of rhetoric, drawing new insights into language, persuasion, and communication from neuroscience research. Findings such as this study of noncommunicative patients can prompt us to broaden our very definitions of rhetoric to include those with impaired communication (such as autism, aphasia, or ‘‘locked-in syndrome’’), asking how communication occurs through different means, or how brain differences might influence communication. (p. 10)

I attempt to close some of the discourse disconnections Gruber (2012) and Calvert, Spence, and Stein (2004) identify while using the second approach to synthesize scholarship in multimodal rhetoric and neurobiology, particularly with respect to multisensory neural processes, explicitly in the discussion of cognitive neuroscience.

Gruber formulates four “Pillars” by which interdisciplinary research involving rhetoric and neuroscience can occur by facilitating a means of “translation” between discourses. These pillars are very much a building tool applied in this book. The first pillar, he explains, is the “field-familiar spokesperson” (p. 237). This is a scholar who is knowledgeable about neuroscience and a second field—a sort of intermediary between discourses. I represent this person in the context of this book. The second pillar is that of the spokesperson’s support—a mechanism by which the spokesperson from Pillar 1 establishes ethos, or credibility, as well as logos for establishing the connection with the neuroscience community (p. 239). As I explained in the Author’s Preface of HTB, I consulted with a neurobiologist to ascertain that I understood concepts of neurobiology that I presented and applied them correctly. This neurobiologist acts as the second pillar in the context of this book.

The third pillar is that of nature; Gruber indicates that nature connects neuroscience with the particular field being applied to it or vice-versa. I have already alluded to Aristotle’s and Perleman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s references to the links between rhetoric and biology. These and the scholarship in neurobiology that I cite contribute to establishing this pillar for this book. The last pillar Gruber identifies is that of “objective writing practice.” He explains that this is a practice that makes writing transparent rather than an exercise in creativity; it is an effort to represent an objective reality rather than corrupt reality. Persuasion pertains to an audience’s perception of reality, which is based heavily on the audience’s prior experiences; consequently, I use that conception of objective reality within the model.

The model that I proposed and develop here further rests on these pillars and is open to further construction. As scholars in rhetoric and other disciplines interact with this model, they act as additional field-familiar spokespersons, lending their credibility to the model’s development and applications. When two or more researchers from different fields join to study a given phenomenon, a synergistic effect occurs within the dynamic of those pillars to strengthen the model and allow for further development.

Cognitive Neuroscience and Rhetoric

The field of neuroscience has experienced a boom in scholarship that integrates several disciplines. Generally, this scholarship ranges across the five general disciplines that are connected with cognitive neuroscience: cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics, biology, and chemistry. Physics is also somewhat involved. Most of these are recognized as “humanities”-related areas, while the others are specifically connected to “science”—biology, chemistry, and physics. As mentioned above, each discipline theorizes neuroscience and cognition by applying its own research methods and theories to analysis and discussion. However, the disconnection across disciplines is problematic, especially as institutions attempt to find ways to connect disciplines with inter-disciplinary programs and research projects. Cognition is associated closely with perception; how one perceives information affects their understanding of that information. The field of cognitive neuroscience devotes much attention to understanding how one processes information toward cognition.

Humanities scholars tend to examine how language and social interactions affect our understanding of the world. Reid (2007) notes that “cognitive scientists termed the 1990s ‘the Decade of the Brain’ for the startling advances made throughout their discipline” (p. 14). Indeed, Hutchins (1996) and Pinker (1997) theorize cognition as a series of developmental processes that include historical dynamics as well as how people treat training and actual practice and social dynamics thereof. This has helped to generate subfields of distributed cognition and cognitive psychology as well as social semiotics. In each case, research in cognitive neuroscience has found that cognition is a multisensory process. Social interaction engages multiple senses—visual, aural, spatial orientation, and relationship, as well as gesture, touch, and smell. Likewise, language is generally recognized as being aural/oral or visual—print-linguistic text is a visual representation.

Science disciplines have been studying connections between perception, behavior, and neural dynamics. Available technology affects how this study occurs. Until recently most of this involved looking at electrical activity within the brain. Neurons send electrical messages across the brain, and the different parts process that information toward doing something with it. However, recent technology has made it possible to look into other physical attributes of the brain and how the brain processes information related to perception and cognition. In particular, two-photon microscopes and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology facilitates such research. Two-photon microscopes permit the imaging of areas of the brain that are excited during tasks, suggesting neural activity. Some MRI technology allows researchers to see how blood flows to certain parts of the brain while one performs a particular task—viewing a given film or doing certain work. This technology is called “functional MRI,” or “fMRI.” Biologists and chemists have begun examining the relationship between blood flow and neural processes. As humanities scholarship has done, many of these studies also link cognition to multisensory processes (for example, see collections edited by Calvert, Spence, and Stein, 2004; and Murray and Wallace, 2012).

Rhetoric encompasses a range of communication practices including informational messages, persuasive messages, and instructional messages. I focused on instructional messages in a previous book; my focus in the book is on the neuro-rhetoric of persuasion. Some studies have found that persuasion involves some different neural activities than cognition related to cognition does (Azar, 2010; Pillay, 2011; and Ramsay et al., 2013). There is more self-reflection and reflection about one’s perception of others and attitudes. Persuasion is a belief-oriented or attitude-oriented concept. The general focus of persuasion is to change one’s attitude or beliefs about a given topic or issue or to elicit a stronger conviction in belief or attitude about that topic or issue. While mirror neurons, for example, are involved in this process as well, that involvement...