I was sitting in a meeting a while back where people were talking about an event that we were planning. We wanted to train people to have intentional one-on-one conversations with others, in order to build better communities.
I made the point that persuasion requires credibility with the audience, an argument that makes sense, and emotional buy-in from the audience. In other words, I said, persuasion requires ethos, logos, and pathos.
These are Greek words that the philosopher/rhetorician Aristotle used to describe successful persuasion in the public sphere. His contexts were the courts, the legislative assembly, and public funerals. He wanted to describe and teach how good public communication worked when trying to persuade groups of people.
I taught these ideas when I was an educator. My graduate degree is in Rhetoric and Composition, which is the study of good written (and often verbal) communication. Students need to learn ethos, pathos, and logos when they write research and argumentative papers, but also as a way to discern when and how outside forces try to influence them. One of the proudest moments of my professional teaching career was when a student came to class and said, "I was watching YouTube last night and I couldn't stop analyzing the ads!"
This framework (emotions, logic, credibility) also applies to communication between individuals. I wrote in a previous post that one of the most powerful tools in community organizers' belts is the one-on-one conversation. A good one-on-one happens when two people establish credibility with one another, make an emotional connection, and when the organizer has a reasonable argument why the other person should take some sort of action.
We as a society have lost the ability to establish credibility with one another, build emotional connections, and establish trust. I have worked in politics for a little while now. I have never convinced anyone of anything on a deep level simply by providing an argument, facts and figures, or graphs.
Deep, meaningful change doesn't happen without trust. Trust isn't built by logic or data. It is built by genuine relationships, sharing of stories, and commitment to action. You cannot truly convince anyone who disagrees with you to change by yelling at them. You may scare or intimidate them. You might be able to apply enough peer pressure to make them act a certain way. But those methods don't create deep and lasting change. You can attract, and change, more people with honey than with vinegar.