According to Aristotle the best way to persuade someone is to make an argument in a structure that balances three key areas: credibility, logical appeal and emotional appeal.
Some call it the Rhetorical Triangle.
Tag: psychology
You become what you do, not what you think
According to psychologist Timothy Wilson:
People draw inferences about who they are by observing their own behavior.
Self-perception theory turns common wisdom on its head. Two powerful ideas follow from it. The first is that we are strangers to ourselves. After all, if we knew our own minds, why would we need to guess what our preferences are from our behavior? If our minds were an open book, we would know exactly how honest we are and how much we like lattes. Instead, we often need to look to our behavior to figure out who we are. Self-perception theory thus anticipated the revolution in psychology in the study of human consciousness, a revolution that revealed the limits of introspection.
But it turns out that we don’t just use our behavior to reveal our dispositions—we infer dispositions that weren’t there before. Often, our behavior is shaped by subtle pressures around us, but we fail to recognize those pressures. As a result, we mistakenly believe that our behavior emanated from some inner disposition.
Stay sharper for longer
With the advent of old age, incidences of misplaced keys and embarrassing moments of forgotten names occur more often. As you inch closer to becoming a senior citizen, certain cognitive skills start to decline and others improve. But you can still find some 70-year-olds who can beat those at 50 on a memory test. How do they retain such abilities and how can that knowledge be used to our advantage? Results emerging from unique studies show that there might indeed be ways to slow down the inevitable slide.
Stay sharper for longer, eu:sci, Autumn 2012 issue.
Akshat Rathi 