Public disclosure

It seems that pathetic appeals are everywhere: commercial advertisement, political campaigns, sports, TV shows, movies, etc. I hardly see any advertisement that delivers a purely rational statement without relying on any pathetic elements, any politicians who have never shown their concerns towards the children or the poor, or any TV shows without emotional plots. Considering the prevalence of the applications of pathetic appeals in many aspects of our society, I think the public disclosure is a bit too dependent on emotional appeals to delivery its argument and ideas. While the pathetic appeals in public disclosure have some advantages, such as satisfying the psychological needs of people and more effective delivery, overflowing of them can put them into an embarrassing situation.

The primary reason for the prevalence of pathetic appeals is that it is more effective than rational and logical argument to convey message. People tend to count on short cut to process information; therefore people are very likely to accept the information intuitively if the information fits into their expectation or attitude. For example, politicians often use this trick: they argue their assertion, not by logically, but by make emotional appeals such as how the poor or the children are in miserable conditions, and being against their policies is equal to being against children. When talking about children and poor people, which are very emotional images, people will naturally show their sympathy without efforts. Politicians catch these psychological laws and often use these emotional figures in their speech to let people accept their argument without “thinking much”. Probably their argument or assertion is problematic, but most people would not care much about the logic of the argument, which requires some effort to think about.
Although it may be immoral to take advantage of others’ sympathy, sometimes people do need some kind of pathetic appeals. Days ago, I saw a sentence on a T-Shirt: Miracle is not what we accomplish, but the courage to start. At the first sight, these words are really touching and there are certainly pathetic appeals within. For a person who is feeling hopeless and desperate, these works would probably give him hope again because these words provide comfort and encouragement, which are exactly what he needs at this moment. However, after the impulse, when I reflect on these words, I feel that it is a little inaccurate. Certainly in some occasions it is not correct. A jobseeker may send out thousands of resumes and you may say he starts a thousand times, but he has not found a job yet. In this case, probably you shouldn’t say miracle happened a thousand times. But in some other occasions, a start does take great courage and it is something can be called real miracle, such as the first moon landing in human history, the first one who proposes the idea of “human right”. But the key thing is, for the hopeless person at the moment, he does need these words to warm him and he would rather believe in these words rather than questioning the accuracy of these words. In some cases when people are in a desperate need of psychological comfort, the logic of the pathetic appeals is not so important.
Pathetic appeals work for the appropriate occasion and the frequency to use and overemphasis on them can lead to the publics’ “immunization” to them and the doubt towards the trustfulness of these pathetic appeals, which puts Increasing number of criticism for commercial advertisement shows that people no longer buy their pathetic appeals schemes. Instead, consumers want the concrete description of product rather than the flowery language and the emotional images. Also, previously hugging children promotes the favorable impression of politicians, but when people are too frequently exposed to these scenes, they may be tried of seeing this again and even doubt whether the politician is just doing show trial and thus hugging children can not earn a positive image for the politician. In these cases when people are “immunized” to the pathetic appeals, pathetic appeals are put into an embarrassing situation: no one can totally trust them as they did before.