Pathos: A Way into Your Heart

Most people have heard of ethos, logos and pathos - the rhetorical triangle. These are three forms of appeal that is used by a speaker to persuade their audience. This stream of thought comes from one of the greatest philosophers of all time, Aristotle and it still holds true today. 

Ethos, logos and pathos are still used as fundamental ways to persuade an audience and is a great tool for communication and marketing. While Logos appeals to the audience’s reason and logic, Ethos establishes the speaker’s authority or trustworthy-ness and finally Pathos appeals to the emotions of the audience. 

While all three are important tools, pathos may be the most effective in driving a point home. Think about it, most people are easily driven by their emotions, rather than logic or trust. If you can appeal to someone’s emotional side, you can convince them much more effectively. So let’s take a deeper look into Pathos.

What is Pathos? 

Pathos refers to the quality of any appeal that evokes sympathy or stirs up one’s emotions. It’s a kind of appeal that can make you tear up or become emotionally invested in a cause. It is perhaps the most effective of the forms of appeal and works on all kinds of audiences- starting from children to adults. 

While reasoning, logic and authority are all important in our decision making, out emotions can often overpower everything else. The word, originally in Greek, means “suffering” or “experience”. Aristotle established this idea in his book, “Rhetoric”. He describes pathos as a means of “awakening people’s emotions in order to sway them towards the opinion of the speaker.” 

Even Plato, Aristotle’s predecessor, understood the power of the emotional appeal and believed it could easily be misused and thus ethos and logos were more beneficial for public discourse. This just goes to show how powerful emotional appeal can really be.

How Pathos is Helpful

Pathos has long been used as an effective tool in writing or even advertising and marketing. Getting the reader emotionally involved is a very important skill that any good writer must have, and the only way to do this is to appeal to the reader’s Pathos. 

But perhaps the most widespread use of Pathos in today’s day and age is in advertising. For instance, think of all the campaigns you have seen against smoking. Most anti-smoking campaigns use pathos to stir up emotions in people, to get them to quit the bad habit. 

Anyone who smokes would know that using Ethos or Logos in getting yourself to quit smoking isn’t as effective as an emotional appeal. These campaigns often inflict the fear of death among people to appeal to their pathos.

Fig 1: A campaign against smoking appeals to the deep-rooted fear people have of death

Most people are extremely afraid of death, but since smoking is a long term habit that destroys your body little by little, it’s easier to ignore the consequences that you might face in the future. So anti-smoking campaigns like the one in Figure 1 created by thetruth.com visualize the consequences-a person in a morgue. Government led initiatives also make it mandatory for even cigarette packets like Benson and Hedges to have pictures of a lung darkened by tar, destroyed by lung cancer or that of a brain after a stroke (another consequence of smoking) . The more horrific, the better- just to get a reaction out of someone. In this way, you are appealing to the emotional side of brain in order to get the audience to quit smoking and be fearful of it. 

Fig 2: A packet of Benson and Hedges Cigarettes showing the picture of a brain after a stroke, invoking fear.

While fear is one of our most primitive emotions, sympathy is another emotion that can work effectively in persuasion. Donation campaigns make use of this tactic extensively and it has been shown time and time again to work. A picture of a starving child like the one shown in Figure 3, created by Save the Children for one of their Hunger Donation Drives makes the audience feel upset or sympathy for the child. An appeal asking the audience to donate, that does not use a picture might have less effect as it’s easier to ignore. A starving child however, is much harder to ignore and the audience is essentially “guilt-tripped” into donating. 

Fig 3: A distressed, starving child invoking sympathy to appeal the audience to make donations

In this way, Pathos is effective in stirring up the emotions in the heart of the audience and getting them to act. Whether it be donations, an appeal to sign a petition or even making lifestyle chances like quitting smoking or going vegan, pathos is an effective technique to get people to act in various kinds of communication campaigns.