From the article "Obama in Your Heart", we realize one more factors that why Obama won the campaign: Elevation. As it is explained in the text, elevation is a collective feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat. Obama's speeches make people feel elevated, excited and phsically evoked. The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport. In American history, many great orators likeMartin Luther King Jr. and Ronald Reagan all obtain this kind of vagal ability.
This article shows a good combination of psychology and politics. I personally find it persuasive as it use many lab experiments, academic words like "oxytocin" and raise famouse people like Oprah Winfrey as an example. For those people who are not familiar with psychology or have never gone deep into the research will deeply be persuaded by these rhetoric.
However, one thing I suspect is: Does elevation exactly what affects people's choice? Could some unknown factors explain all these more accurately? Does the author lay too much emphasis on "elevation"? Does the author just raise the word "elevation" and use some special cases to support his predication?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
interesting questions at the end...i definitely feel that Obama's oratorical ability to "elevate" his audience won him a lot of votes, but there were certainly a number of other factors that the author seemed to neglect in this piece in order to play up the role played by psychology in the election.
ReplyDelete