“Outside Lobbying” over the Airwaves: A Randomized Field Experiment on Televised Issue Ads

We present the first field experiment on how organized interest groups’ television ads affect issue opinions. We randomized 31,404 voters to three weeks of interest group ads about either immigration or transgender nondiscrimination. We then randomly assigned voters to receive ostensibly unrelated surveys either while the ads aired, one day after they stopped, or three days afterwards. Voters recalled the ads, but three ads had a minimal influence on public opinion, whereas a fourth’s effects decayed within one day. However, voters remembered a fact from one ad. Our results suggest issue ads can affect public opinion but that not every ad persuades and that persuasive effects decay. Despite the vast sums spent on television ads, our results are the first field experiment on their persuasive power on issues, shedding light on the mechanisms underpinning—and limits on—both televised persuasion and interest group influence.

A wave of metaphors: image and visual metaphors in cartoons from a cognitive-discursive perspective

This paper aligns with a field of research that deals with the use of multimodal metaphors from a cognitive-discursive perspective. In this context, we aim to investigate the role played by images in the instantiation of cross-domain mappings in a particular genre. Specifically, we describe and analyze the cognitive-discursive nature and functioning of visual metaphors in political and social cartoons. This paper first explores the concepts of image schemas, image metaphors, and visual metaphors, as well as the notion of metaphoricity in discourse. We then carry out the analysis of multimodal metaphors in a corpus of editorial cartoons that depict the Covid-19 pandemic, and other related issues within social and political contexts. Some of our findings suggest that cartoons often evoke multilayered off-line frames, image metaphors and conceptual metaphors in order to enhance the persuasive power of their semiotic arrangement, especially by inviting their audience to actively participate in meaning-construction processes

Changing Americans’ Attitudes about Immigration: Using Moral Framing to Bolster Factual Arguments

How can the effect of appeals on immigration attitudes be bolstered? Partisans’ tendency to interpret facts consistent with their priors impedes evidence-based persuasion. Accordingly, most prior work finds that favorable information about the impact of immigration has little or no influence on policy preferences. Here we propose that appealing to moral values can bolster the persuasive power of information. Across three experiments (total N = 4,616), we find that an argument based on the value of in-group loyalty, which emphasized that immigrants are critical to America’s economic strength, combined with information about the economic impact of legal immigration, significantly increased Americans’ support for legal immigration. Additionally, we found a significant effect of the moral component of this message, whereas the effect of the information alone was of similar size but only marginally significant. These results show that moral arguments can strengthen the persuasiveness of informational appeals.

What do we need to trust in models?

Scientists working with numerical models may notice that their presentations of numerical results to non-specialists sometimes unfold substantial persuasive power. It seems obvious that someone has worked intensively on a topic, bundled information and solved complicated equations on a high-performance computer. The final result is a number, a curve or a three-dimensional representation. The computer has made no mistake, so the result can certainly be trusted. But can it? Those who do the modelling often know the weak points of their models and invest time in increasing the reliability of the model calculation. Trust in model calculations is usually based on rigorous quality assurance of data, programs, simulation calculations and result analyses. It requires appropriate handling of uncertainties. In view of the simplifications and idealizations of models it is also necessary to assess which model results are actually meaningful. Additionally, in most cases simplified or idealised models have been used and it is necessary to assess which model results are actually meaningful. We want to discuss what it takes to generate simulation results that can be considered reliable and how scientists can appropriately convey their confidence in their own models in discussions with the public. The framework of the discussion is provided by an introduction from Martin Navarro und Ingo Kock (BASE) and we are happy to have brief input from Thomas Nagel (TUBAF), Klaus-Jürgen Röhlig (TUC) and Wolfram Rühaak (BGE).

PROMOTIONAL INNOVATION OF GIRILOYO BATIK THROUGH DIGITAL STORYTELLING

This study aims to explore the use of the Giriloyo Batik promotion model by using the storytelling method in digital media. So far, Batik marketing has been carried out by direct selling, so that during the Covid-19 pandemic, batik sales fell very significantly. The basic assumption of this research is that narrative selling has persuasive power. The method used in this research is the exploratory method. The materials explored are various stories, myths and local wisdom of the Giriloyo community. This local wisdom is then transformed into a narrative associated with batik for marketing purposes. The results showed that (a) The audience who watched the promotional video was interested in the storyline which contained batik's connection with the legend of Giriloyo; (b) the audience is interested in the philosophical story of batik motifs; (c) Audience is interested in visiting Giriloyo.

Feeling the Way to Revelation: Patterns of Doubt and Persuasion in Tibetan Buddhist Auto/biographical Treasure Narratives

In the Tibetan Buddhist Treasure (gter ma) tradition, communities cohere around the marking of certain visions as offering insight into the proper method of ritual practices, the veracity of reincarnation claims, decisions about institutional structures, assertions of lineage relationships, and most importantly for the purposes of this article, the phenomenology of Buddhist enlightenment for readers lacking such experience. There is a long and robust history of doubt around such visions and their narrative accounts. Doubters seek to debunk and disenfranchise those whose visions they dispute. This article analyzes the emotional dynamics and aesthetic charge of five exemplary visionary accounts from the 17th–20th century, with a focus on how doubts are overcome through intense positive sensory experiences within their life stories. Such narratives generate a sense of religious belonging in Tibetan Buddhist Treasure communities, beginning with the visionary him- or herself whose successful navigation of doubt is resolved by the persuasive power of intensely positive aesthetic experience.

Playing with Fire

This chapter outlines the theoretical foundation for the book, first by describing the persuasive power of images, how they are made meaningful, and why they are especially useful in the construction of ideological messages. The concept of embodied gatekeeping, key to understanding the way news images are constructed, is explicated in this chapter, along with the book’s overall argument: social actors struggle over the construction of visual messages in embodied and discursive ways, and digitization has vastly expanded the encoding capabilities of everyday citizens, allowing them to add visibility to their expression of democratic voice even as the ethical rules for visual expression are inchoate. The chapter offers a mass-media model for the way images are created and then recontextualized, and an updated model for the way the recontextualization process is uncontrollably accelerated in the digital age.

Linguopragmatic Features of Persuasive Power of Satire Based on Private Eye Magazine

This paper focuses on investigating linguopragmatic features of persuasive power of satire in British media discourse. The material for the research includes 56 texts of randomly chosen articles from British satirical Private Eye magazine (2019-2021). Qualitative content analysis and discourse analysis were applied to distinguish linguistic, stylistic, and pragmatic means of persuasion used in the analyzed paper. Relevance theory was used to outline interpretational procedure of satire and cognitive dissonance theory was applied to explain the mechanism of satire’s power of persuasion implementation. The paper establishes that persuasive power of satire is an outcome of successfully realized critical and ludic functions of satire. Critical function of satire is realized with the help of linguopragmatic means which are capable of highlighting discrepancy between a desired and a current state of affairs, thus evoking cognitive dissonance, whereas ludic function of satire is realized by means of creating humorous effect. Linguopragmatic means of satire’s critical function implementation include echo utterances, metaphors, repetitions, hyperboles, precedent related phenomena, and adjectives with negative connotative meanings accompanied by linguistic means of negations. Ludic function of satire is realized by wordplay techniques such as homophones, onomatopoeias, rhymes, acronyms, puns, neologisms, slang, pseudonyms, and sobriquets. Interpretation of these linguopragmatic means requires more processing efforts but causes a significant increase in cognitive effects.