Browsing by Subject "Persuasion"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Too Close for Comfort: Resisting Relevance as a Lever for Persuasion
    (2019-11-22) Derricks, Veronica; Earl, Allison
    Objective: This work investigates how broad principles of persuasion (e.g., the role of relevance) operate in the context of social identities. Although relevance is expected to facilitate persuasion, we use information targeting as a relevance intervention to test whether and why signaling relevance through identities (e.g., race) backfires. Methods: In Study 1, medical practitioners were surveyed about their evaluations and use of information targeting. In Studies 2-5, European Americans and African Americans were told they received information about HIV and/or flu after providing their demographics (targeting condition) or due to chance (control condition). Collectively, these studies tested the direct consequences of increasing relevance via targeting identities (Study 2), the mechanism underlying these consequences (Studies 3-4), whether consequences emerge only when identities are used as a relevance cue (Studies 3-4), and whether perceptions about the source of relevance produces divergent consequences (Study 5). Results: Practitioners reported favorable evaluations and use of targeting (Study 1). In Studies 2-5, being in the targeting (versus control) condition generally decreased attention to the information and produced more negative source evaluations for African Americans, but not European Americans. Studies 3-4 showed that consequences emerged due to perceptions of being unfairly judged, and only emerged when racial identities were used as a relevance cue. Study 5 revealed that targeting backfires when recipients perceive that relevance is derived from the research team. Conclusions: Leveraging relevance through social identities can preclude the expected benefits of relevance by increasing perceptions of judgment and/or beliefs that relevance is being externally imposed.
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    Variation in Rhetorical Moves in Grant Proposals of U.S. Humanists and Scientists
    (Publisher of original article: Walter de Gruyter. [BREAK][LINK]http://www.degruyter.com/[/LINK], 2000) Connor, Ulla, 1948-
    Grant proposals are a significant part of professional writing. Described as 'the most basic form of scientific writing' (Myers 1990: 41), they are the key to obtaining research funding and support for professional activity. Recently, grant proposals have been included among promotional genre studies by applied linguists, and 'moves' have been suggested for the rhetorical structures in the texts of EU grant proposals (Connor and Mauranen, 1999). The present study uses these moves to analyze rhetorical variation in 14 research grant proposals written by five humanities and science researchers for US government and private funders. The major purpose of the study was to determine the accuracy with which the moves were identified with the writers; the use of the moves among the five different disciplines and by male and female writers was also studied. Text-based interviews were conducted with the writers following the text analysis of grant proposals. The results showed that the system of moves was clear and meaningful to the researcher-writers, but that US grant proposals required an additional 'institutional commitment claim', a hypothesis statement in addition to goals, and more metatextual transitional statements than the proposals in the earlier EU study.
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    What “12 Angry Men” Teaches Us about the Art of Persuasion
    (Public Library of Science, 2024-03-11) Sullivan, Bill