Persuasion
Communication intended to change what someone believes, feels, or does. The wide category: it includes honest argument, advertising, and propaganda alike, and is distinguished from propaganda by whether the audience's judgment is engaged or bypassed.
Aristotle divided the means of persuasion into the character of the speaker, the disposition of the audience, and the argument itself, and the division still holds: ethos, pathos, and logos are the three levers every persuader pulls. Nothing in the division is dishonest. A doctor persuading a patient to take a medicine uses all three.
The line between persuasion and propaganda is therefore not the presence of emotion or authority but what is done with the audience's judgment. Jowett and O'Donnell describe persuasion as a transaction in which both sides have something to gain and the audience keeps the power to say no; propaganda serves the propagandist and is built so that the audience's refusal never comes up. A practical test is whether the message would survive the audience thinking carefully about it. Persuasion invites that. Propaganda is designed to make it unnecessary, and the techniques in this reference are the ways it does so.
The distinction matters because the techniques are not themselves proof of bad faith. A Testimonial from a real expert is evidence of a kind; a Slogan can summarize a true position. The question each technique page tries to answer is what the device is doing in place of an argument, and what the audience should do about it.
Compare propaganda and rhetoric.
Sources
- Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria O'Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion. 7th ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2019. ISBN 978-1506371344
- Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Translated by George A. Kennedy. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
- Cialdini, Robert B. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Rev. ed. New York: Harper Business, 2021. ISBN 978-0062937650