Emotional communication makes people feel something
How do we get people to care about our ideas?
We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic “37 grams of fat” doesn’t elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region.We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness.
Good communication makes people care (by “looking at the one” not the statistics), uses the power of association (by connecting desired outcomes with high leverage terms), appeals to self-interest (and not just base self-interest, by visualizing what it could do for you), and appeals to identity (by understanding how people make decisions based on identity).
See also:
- Communicating ideas requires overcoming the curse of knowledge
- Simple communication expresses the core of an idea
- Unexpected communication violates expectations
- Concrete communication explains in terms of human actions and senses
- Credible communication carries its own credentials
- Story-based communication elicits effective responses