The Art of Persuasion: Reflective Essay

Persuasion is a general term of influence. Every person requires the art of persuasion at some point in his life, and this is the only method a person can follow to achieve what he wants. A persuasion is a form of influence, a process that directs people to accept an idea, attitude or action. Persuasion requires technology because no one will believe what the other one said until he is convinced of this.

Thus, we can conclude that persuasion is an art that everyone uses at some point in their life.

Practically in every role and life path it is necessary to influence other people. From direct sales to advertising and interviews, influence is everywhere. Influence, however, is an art, and this needs to be understood. What works in one situation may not work in another. In other words, the effectiveness of any exposure technique can be situational. The art of persuasion has been studied for countless years by people all over the world with the intention of using it both positively and negatively. In fact, it is likely that you have purchased items, supported reasons, voted for politicians, and much more, because you have become a victim of the mastery of persuasion.

Persuasion is an extremely important aspect of the political process. Although most beliefs are based on aspects of psychology, sociology, and social psychology, there is a neurobiological aspect of persuasion.

As you develop skills and better understand, when someone or something is working to persuade you, it is imperative to question the ethics of what you do. After all, while everyone is responsible for their own actions, so many people would not study and use persuasive tactics if they did not have a strong likelihood of influencing someone's beliefs, behaviors, and decisions.

The power of images has been used by many world leaders as a powerful tool. The same method of using religious images that politicians use today .

There are many different types of persuasive techniques, such as general ethos, pathos and logos, and repetition.

However, using too many logos can be difficult, as too many facts and statistics make speech ordinary.

Thus, the art of persuasion is not only to give pleasure, but rather to persuade, and many more people control the caprice than the mind!

But the style of pleasure is incomparably more complex, thinner, more useful and more delightful. The art of persuasion has been central to politics since humanity first began to organise itself into communities. When asked to think of examples of political persuasion, many people would probably immediately think of politicians and activists who had mastered oratory and rhetorical skills. Images of a leader delivering a stirring speech to move hearts and minds are burned into our collective consciousness. Rhetoric itself formed a central part of the European classical education for thousands of years for exactly this reason. No less an author than Aristotle described it as the key to the art of persuasion and a function of both politics and the science of logic.

The person who is willing to keep asking for what they want, and keeps demonstrating value, is ultimately the most persuasive. The way that so many historical figures have ultimately persuaded masses of people is by staying persistent in their endeavors and message. Consider Abraham Lincoln, who lost his mother, three sons, a sister, his girlfriend, failed in business and lost eight separate elections before he was elected president of the United States.

Now there is art, and this is what I give to show the connection of truths with their principles, be it truth or pleasure, provided that the principles that were once declared remain solid and never contradicted.

Political campaigns focus their time and money on a small number of hesitant voters who decide elections. The first step of persuasion is always to identify those people who are currently convincing from your point of view, and to focus your energy and attention on them.

Persuading people to support a particular candidate or party is an essential test of any political

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Persuasion is not Manipulation - Manipulation is coercion through force to get someone to do something that is not in their own interest. Persuasion is the art of getting people to do things that are in their own best interest that also benefit you. campaign. But precisely how to move voters successfully is a matter still not fully understood — and the raison d’etre for political strategists and pundits. said Matthew Blackwell

In the field of political science, conventional wisdom has long held that people generally will act in ways that support their fundamental views and preferences. The idea behind the “rational actor” theory ― that people seek to act in their own self-interest ― sounds perfectly logical. But it fails to explain what causes some voters to change their political views or preferences over time.

Now, political scientists at Harvard and Stanford universities, drawing from longstanding social psychology research, have concluded that a person’s political attitudes are actually a consequence of the actions he or she has taken — and not their cause.

In a new working paper, the researchers say changing political attitudes can be understood in the context of “cognitive dissonance,” a theory of behavioral psychology that asserts that people experience uneasiness after acting in a way that appears to conflict with their beliefs and preferences about themselves or others. To minimize that mental discomfort, the theory posits, a person will adapt his or her attitude to better fit with or justify previous actions.

“There’s a whole host of things going on in social psychology, and behavioral economics about how humans act and how preferences are formed” that can shed more light on “why politics is the way it is,” said Matthew Blackwell, an assistant professor of government in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) who co-authored the paper with Maya Sen, an assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), and Avidit Acharya, an assistant professor of political science at Stanford.

The paper offers a new framework for understanding the origin of political attitudes and preferences and how they may change over time, and presents a formal theory about how people adjust their political preferences in order to downplay cognitive dissonance, a theory that has predictive power.

“I think this gives us a lot of insights into how people’s political attitudes come to be formed, and specifically how they change over time,” said Blackwell. “The more we think about these different mechanisms in people’s heads, I think the better we’re going to be able to … figure out what messages are going to work and what strategies are not going to work.” said Matthew Blackwell, an assistant professor of government in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences who has co-authored a new paper on how a person's political attitude is developed.

Blackwell says the findings offer the first formal theory of political attitude change framed within the context of cognitive dissonance, one that could offer new understanding across a range of political behaviors and help answer questions like what causes political partisanship, what drives ethnic and racial animosity, and how empathy with key social ties is so effective in shifting a person’s political views.

The paper was inspired in part by prior research and a forthcoming book project, which examines the long-term impact of slavery on political attitudes in the American South and why white people who live in areas historically active during slavery still hold very conservative and hostile views on race more than 150 years after slavery ended.

In today’s political world, the desire to reconcile cognitive dissonance drives the growing tendency of political candidates to emphasize apolitical qualities such as personality and demeanor while deliberately cultivating vagueness about their policy positions in an effort to minimize cognitive dissonance in voters’ eyes, said Blackwell.

“The less they know about your policies, the less strife they’ll feel in voting for you if they disagree with you,” he said.

The research also suggests that if political parties can get young people to vote for their candidates at an early age, that could “lock in benefits” over the long term. “What we know is that just the act of voting for a candidate seems to increase your affiliation toward that political party over time and makes you a more habitual voter over time,” said Blackwell.

As for the upcoming 2016 presidential race, cognitive dissonance predicts that parties that have a very combative primary season, like the one expected to take place among a vast Republican field, are weakened going into a general election, “not necessarily because of the ‘beleaguered candidate’ or ‘tired candidate’ that we sometimes hear about, but more because there’s a large group of voters who have to reconcile the fact they really vigorously opposed a [primary] candidate and now are being asked to vote for that candidate,” he said. “You have to engage with that cognitive dissonance about whether or not that’s actually a thing you would be able to do.” The big danger for a party is that voters who can’t reconcile their previous support for different candidate might simply sit out the general election.

“This is why you see so much intense management in primary season of endorsements from candidates who dropped out and a lot of rallying the party around a candidate … to make sure that everyone’s on the same page,” said Blackwell. “The longer these primaries go, it could be the case that the more entrenched people’s attitudes become, and it’s harder to dislodge those.”

1. Susan Sontag, 'Posters: Advertisement, Art, Political Artifact, Commodity,' in Donald Stermer, ed., The Art of Revolution: 96 Posters from Castro's Cuba, 1959–1970 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970). [Back to top]
2. Katherine McCoy as quoted by Elena G. Millie in 'College Poster Art,' Art Journal 44 (spring 1984)