A window into minds

By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban

One of the recurrent remarks I make when reviewing research on political discourse, which is a flourishing domain of linguistic studies, is the little attention paid to how political speeches, parliamentary discussions, debates, press releases, etc. are processed by the audience, and the role of the audience in the communication chain. Nevertheless, this has intrigued social and cognitive psychologists since the sixties of the 20th century. Communication is a problem-solving task for both communicators. For the addressor, what is problematic is to provide enough clues to make it possible for the addressee to process the message easily; humans abandon “exhaustive” communication in most of the cases. The addressee, on the other hand, gets his/her problem solved when she/he assumes that the message obtained is worthy of the processing effort exerted. 

The audience also make use of their background knowledge, world experiences, attitudes, biases, presuppositions, anecdotal memories, sociopolitical backgrounds, ethnic identities, values, beliefs, and expectations. How do the audience, friendly and hostile, process a given political speech or rhetoric? 

Site of power exercise

Political discourse is typically viewed as a site of power exercise where ideological messages are strongly conveyed. The notion of politics proves elusive, defined in diverse senses. An extremely general trend regards every single social practice, verbal and non-verbal, political. A more common trend sees political discourse as that one produced by politicians in political addresses, press releases, parliamentary debates, etc. It is not necessarily linguistic. When manipulated by a government, language has a crucial, unconscious influence on people’s political thought, creating a bundle of responses, assumptions and attitudes. that shape our experience when we use, read, or hear something related to that event. 

Mythic thinking

One major characteristic of political discourse is that it is persuasive, whether by making the case or not making the case. It intends to make the audience believe and do something they otherwise might not have. Persuasion takes different forms. One common form is mythic thinking in which there is usually one and only one apparent cause of an event, hence it is unscientific as any event can be caused by a number of variables. Interestingly, mythic thinking enjoys wide support among audience members, especially the politically naïve, as its premises and conclusions are not verified; they are taken for granted. However, in the digital age, people have become less vulnerable to mythic thinking campaigns, thanks to the new media and the multiplicity of platforms and institutions that provide diverse and sometimes opposing opinions and ideologies to those marketed by governments. The political scene is no longer constructed solely by the elite in power. 

Audience awareness

Wallman-Bonilla proposes four kinds of rhetorical moves usually signalling audience awareness on the part of the addressor: (1) naming moves which guide audience to take a stance, (2) context moves that furnish the background information the addressor feels the addressees need to work out meaning, (3) strategy moves that keep the audience’s interest and appeal to their emotions, and (4) response moves that may explain the audience’s possible inquiries or concerns. Audience are of three groups: friendly, neutral and hostile. Persuading a hostile audience is the most difficult task. It is recommendable that the arguer anticipates the audience opposing views, as “no matter how reasonable and well supported your argument is, hostile readers or listeners may well refuse to accept your line of reasoning and cling stubbornly to their own opinions” state Daniels and Daniels.

Peripheral vs. central processing

Persuasive discourse is processed either peripherally or centrally. Audience, while processing peripherally, have little processing load and are concerned with the speaker’s style, look, posture and reactions. Further, persuasion is successful when the opinions proposed are close to the respondent’s scope of acceptance. This explains why friendly and neutral audiences are more easily persuaded than hostile audience, since the persuader’s opinions are close to the hostile audience’s scope of rejection. Moreover, the more involved the audience, the higher the possibility they would to critically receive an opinion and even place it within the rejection scope.

 Inoculation is a further factor of successful persuasion. It is explained in the weak attacks on audience members’ existing attitudes and beliefs. Inoculation is manipulated by some persuaders to get audience prepared for resisting unfavourable claims deliberately introduced by the persuaders to secure audience’s rejection of these claims. 

Finally, because persuasion poses a threat to the individual’s freedom and autonomy, self-esteem is a key construct in this regard. High self-esteem individuals examine the persuasive messages by looking for their pros and cons, whereas low self-esteem ones find it difficult to do that, and alternatively adopt the view proposed by the persuader. 

This is a drop in the ocean of language processing. Hope to follow up on this mysterious issue in the future. 

By Dr Laila Abdel Aal Alghalban

Professor of linguistics

Faculty of Arts 

Kafr el-sheikh University

Email: [email protected]