Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Propaganda by Anthony R. Pratkanis & Elliot Aronson

Author:Anthony R. Pratkanis & Elliot Aronson [Pratkanis, Anthony R. & Aronson, Elliot]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Communication, General, Influence, Media, Media Studies, News, News Media, Political Advocacy, Political Process, Political Science, Propaganda, Psychology, Public Relations, Social Psychology, Social Science, Activism
ISBN: 9780805074031
Google: 9LsuMoEtSV4C
Amazon: 0805074031
Barnesnoble: 0805074031
Goodreads: 401333
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Published: 1991-09-30T23:00:00+00:00

Emotional Appeals: Touch the Heart, Persuade the Mind

24

The Fear Appeal

In 1741, in the small New England town of Enfield, Connecticut, Jonathan Edwards delivered a sermon entitled "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." In this sermon, he preached:

Thus it is that natural men are held in the hand of God, over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it... the devil is waiting for them, hell is gaping for them, the flames gather and flash about them, and would fain lay hold on them, and swallow them up. ... In short, they have no refuge, nothing to take hold of; all that preserves them every moment is the mere arbitrary will, and uncovenanted, unobliged forbearance of an incensed God.1

Eyewitness accounts indicate that the sermon left the congregation "breathing of distress and weeping." The records show that thousands gave over their lives to Christ as part of the Great Awakening of eighteenth-century America.

Two centuries later, Adolf Hitler offered these words to his fellow countrymen and -women:

The Jew regards work as a means of exploiting other peoples. The Jew is the ferment of the decomposition of peoples. This means that the Jew destroys and has to destroy. The Jew is harmful to us. ... What then are the specifically Jewish aims? To spread their invisible State as supreme tyranny over all other States in the whole world.

Communism is the forerunner of death, of national destruction, and extinction. . . . The red mob is threatening Berlin. . . . Today we may be convinced that there are more than 600,000 to 700,000 Communists in Berlin. How do people imagine a German future, as long as this increase is not checked? We must fight to the very end those tendencies which have eaten into the soul of the German nation.2

Millions of Germans gladly embraced Hitler's National Socialist party.

Although the goals of Edwards and Hitler were quite different, their method was the same—instilling fear. Both Edwards and Hitler threatened their audiences with dire consequences if a certain course of action was not followed.

Fire-and-brimstone preachers and Nazis are not the only ones who arouse fear in order to motivate and persuade. Life insurance agents play on our anxieties to induce purchase of their policies. Parents try to scare their children in hopes of having them come home early from a date. Physicians use fear to insure that patients adopt and maintain a prescribed medical regimen. The nightly news carries reports of one sensational crime after another, thus increasing our fear of the streets. The political party that is out of office treats us to tales of the economic and moral collapse of the nation in hopes of gaining power. And special-interest groups announce one food fear after another—coffee may cause pancreatic cancer, the use of aluminum pots can produce Alzheimer's disease, corn flakes contain hazardous amounts of the pesticide EDB—despite the fact that Americans' life expectancy continues to increase.3

Sometimes these fear appeals are based on legitimate

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