5.1 Overview

Pathos is the use of emotion to persuade an audience. The effective use of pathos depends critically on a keen understanding of the writer’s audience and the emotions they are likely to be experiencing at the time of the communicative event. More importantly, the writer should be aware of what triggers the audience might have that are likely to induce states of emotion that are liable to cause them to act or think as a she desires. Thus it is important to know both the existing and possible range of emotions for a particular audience. College students, when asked to describe their current or recent emotional states, will typically come up with a list that looks something like this: happy, sad, stressed, anxious, hopeful, afraid, tired, hungry, Notice first that this list includes some items that are more biological than emotional, namely tired and hungry. For most rhetorical purposes, many biological states and emotional states are fairly interchangeable because 1) Certain emotional states can induce certain biological states, and 2) Certain biological states can induce certain emotional states, and 3) Some words like agitated or depressed actually describe states that are in part physical and in part mental. This is why it could be argued that water bottle advertisements use pathos by appealing to the thirst of their audience. We can posit that thirst is a biological need that causes a desire that can only be fulfilled by the kind of clean, natural water these bottled water advertisements seem to be offering. Or consider anger, which is usually accompanied by physiological responses like increased heart rate, blood pressure, respiration and body temperature. In most cases a biological need can be clearly associated with one or more attendant emotional needs. For rhetorical purposes, biological and emotional states are very similar, and with a few reservations can be considered under the heading of pathos.

5.2 Push/Pull Methods

Two strategies can be adopted for utilizing pathos, which I call the pull method and the push method. The pull method utilizes the existing emotional state of the audience to convince them to take a particular action or buy into a particular idea. It assumes that most undesirable emotional states seek resolution to some more desirable state. In other words, if you have an action or idea you want a sad audience to adopt, stress how your suggested action or idea will make them happy, or if you know your audience is stressed, show how taking the action you recommend can help them attain peace of mind, and so on. The push method, on the other hand, induces an emotion, then subsequently offers a solution. For example, showing or telling about injustices can make an audience angry, and the solution most sought after from an angry audience is revenge or justice, so that once a writer induces anger in an audience, they can proceed to offer an action or idea that resolves that anger by showing how that action or idea provides a path to revenge, or in more positive terms, to justice.

5.3 Kairotic Method

The kairotic method may make more sense once you have read about kairos, but essentially, it is adjusting the timing or introduction of an idea, concept, or call to action to coincide with a particular emotional state in an attempt to create an association between the two. For example, the appearance of a villain in a drama is often accompanied by dark or scary music, so the villain is associated with unpleasant emotions. Note that there doesn’t have to be a logical connection between the emotion and the idea or concept – they just have to occur at the same time to create an association that isn’t necessarily rational. For an example of how Budweiser uses the kairotic method to associate their brand with feelings of happiness and joy, recall the famous commercial that has a puppy getting lost, getting into dangerous situations, and returning home. Right at the moment the audience is about to cry, the Budweiser logo takes over the screen. There is no logical connection here between the Budweiser logo and the joy the audience feels when the puppy returns home, but the writer’s hope the audience will forever associate that feeling with their product just because the two events happened at the same time.