Table Of ContentSOCIAL INFLUENCE, POWER,
AND MULTIMODAL
COMMUNICATION
Social Influence, Power, and Multimodal Communication reveals how democratic leaders and
dictators exploit multimodal communication to convince or seduce their audiences,
using words, voice, gesture, face, gaze, and posture to boast about their merits or insult
and ridicule rivals.
Poggi and D’Errico explore questions such as what is charisma, and how do we
perceive it in a leader? And how do politicians display their dominance over opponents,
or discredit them in TV debates and social media? Starting from a sociocognitive model
of social interaction, observational studies reveal the rhetoric of words, hands, and faces,
explaining how to see beyond their literal meanings, while experimental studies test their
uses and persuasive effects. The authors affirm that multimodality helps others to
influence us through displays of dominance, and by undermining our power through
comments, insults, irony, ridicule, and parody. The devices of social influence and its
multimodal management are illuminated, giving readers insight into how people
influence others’ lives by using body language and verbal communication, either
explicitly or in subtle but inexorable ways.
This fascinating text is a superb resource for students of psychology, communication,
pragmatics, and political sciences, as well as for school teachers, politicians, spin doctors,
active citizenship workers, and anyone seeking to understand how communicative
power is managed, both in politics and everyday social contexts.
Isabella Poggi is a full professor of Psychology of Emotions and Multimodal
Communication at Roma Tre University. She works on emotions, multimodality,
deception, music, and political communication.
Francesca D’Errico is an associate professor of Social Psychology and Psychology of
New Media and Advertising at the University of Bari Aldo Moro. She works on
persuasive and emotional processes, and on the relationships between new media and
ethical conduct.
SOCIAL INFLUENCE,
POWER, AND
MULTIMODAL
COMMUNICATION
Isabella Poggi and Francesca D’Errico
Cover image: Getty
First published 2023
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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© 2023 Isabella Poggi and Francesca D’Errico
The right of Isabella Poggi and Francesca D’Errico to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-367-46526-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-46527-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-02927-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003029274
Typeset in Bembo
by MPS Limited, Dehradun
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 A sociocognitive model of mind, social interaction,
emotion, and communication 5
Isabella Poggi
2 Social influence and persuasion 24
Isabella Poggi
3 Persuasive discourse 40
Isabella Poggi
4 Persuasive gesture and persuasive gaze 51
Isabella Poggi and Laura Vincze
5 Dominance and its signals 69
Francesca D’errico and Isabella Poggi
6 Charisma: The gift of influence 82
Isabella Poggi and Francesca D’errico
7 Benito Mussolini: Charisma of a italian dictator in his words
and multimodal communication 91
Isabella Poggi and Francesca D’errico
vi Contents
8 How to increase one’s power by decreasing the other’s?
The force of discredit 115
Francesca D’errico and Isabella Poggi
9 Subtle ways to discredit in debates: Comments by words,
face, and body 144
Isabella Poggi, Francesca D’errico, and Laura Vincze
10 Attacking the opponent’s image: Insult as a weapon for
political discredit 163
Isabella Poggi and Francesca D’errico
11 A laughter will bury you: Ridicule as a discrediting move 183
Isabella Poggi and Francesca D’errico
12 Irony and ridicule in a judicial debate 195
Isabella Poggi
13 Parody as a political weapon 209
Isabella Poggi and Francesca D’errico
14 Cognitive, affective, and persuasive effects of political
parody 238
Francesca D’errico
15 Conclusion 255
Isabella Poggi and Francesca D’errico
References 259
Index 276
INTRODUCTION
Isabella Poggi and Francesca D’Errico
I.1 Social influence and communication
A teacher trying to ingratiate her principal; a boy bullying a schoolmate; two nations
struggling to conquer a region; two deers fighting to determine access to females
in the herd; a gangster from the racket threatening a shopkeeper; two neighbors
arguing during a condominium meeting; a spoiled child whimpering to obtain a
new toy from his mother ….
Power is an everyday matter. Everyday, in innumerable areas of your life,
people try to influence you, dominate, and win over you. But physical strength
and money are not the only weapons of power: knowledge, reputation, emotions,
and communication do a great part of the job.
This book explores the ways in which people influence each other, trying to
gain power at the expense of each other by using the weapons of communication;
it shows how power, whether material or symbolic, is one of the motives of our
social action. It highlights how people acquire or increase their power or lower the
power of others by means of communication, image, and emotions; how power
generates emotions both in those who hold it and in those who are victims of it;
and how communication, in explicit and subtle ways, through words and our
whole body, can increase or erode power.
To influence others means to direct their decisions, and we can do so in order
to altruistic motives – see the mother advising her son not to drink on Saturday
night, to come back home safe – or to selfish motives – having someone do
something that is in your interest. Sometimes we try to influence others to acquire
power, like does a politician in his election campaign. But if power is an end of
influence, it may be also a means for it. To influence others, one must appear
strong or credible: that is, show one does have power.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003029274-1
2 Introduction
There are various means for influence, from threat to education, from gaining
sympathy to triggering fear. Biological evolution has provided humans with a
powerful and (apparently) bloodless tool to influence others – communication – and
persuasion is the prototypical case of communication aimed to influence; but any
sentence, gesture, facial expression, and even the most neutral, disinterested,
nonevaluative information, is aimed at having another believe or do something.
Our communication is multimodal: we do not communicate by words only,
but by the whole of our body: a gesture, a way to stare other, a smile or a raised
eyebrow, a shrug or an accusing index finger, a bow, a laughter. In all these ways,
can you have others know how clever you are, or how ridiculous another is. By all
these signals sometimes we want to transmit their explicit meaning, but sometimes
we want to convey something else, where our true message is very different from
the apparent one. Our voice, hands, face, eyes, and entire body launch literal and
indirect meanings, rhetorical figures, and implicit messages: such is the complexity
of our communication.
I.2 Multimodal communication in debates
The first chapter of this book illustrates the toolbox of our work, the theoretical
notions adopted in the subsequent chapters: a sociocognitive model which,
starting from the two basic notions of goal and belief, allows us to define all the
main aspects of our mind, social interaction, emotions, and communication. By
combining these two primitive notions we draw the traits of many other notions:
power and dependence, conflict and territory, exchange and altruism, choice and
evaluation, image and self-image, nature and function of emotions; further, we
outline the nature and functions of direct and indirect, verbal and multimodal
communication, deception, social influence while providing concepts and tools
for the analysis of real communication.
Chapters 2–4 present a model of persuasion as a form of “overt” social influence
and analyze some cases of political and everyday persuasion, highlighting the direct
and indirect meanings conveyed in various modalities, while wondering what is
persuasive in a discourse or in our bodily signals, and if persuasive gestures or a
persuasive gaze exists. Our model of persuasion applies Aristotle’s idea that the
persuader exploits three elements: (1) logos – rational argumentation, (2) ethos – the
orator’s personality, and (3) pathos – the appeal to the audience’s emotions.
Out of these three strategies, the subsequent chapters mainly focus on the
management of ethos by politicians in TV debates. Here the basic principle is that
people are not so much persuaded by what other people tell them, but mainly by
who is it who tells them; the more we trust in the persuader, the sooner and more
easily are we persuaded, especially when our knowledge of the themes dealt with
is not so rich or detailed. Therefore, the image the receiver makes up of the
persuader – the persuader’s credibility – becomes crucial in determining the
credibility of the message itself, and the receiver’s likeliness to comply with it.
Introduction 3
Within ethos, from Chapter 5 onwards three criteria are singled out in terms of
which a politician must be evaluated positively in order to result in credibility
and make one’s persuasion more effective: (1) benevolence (a criterion of moral
evaluation that considers the politician’s sincerity and disinterest), (2) competence
(his intelligence, knowledge, planning, and communication skills), and (3) dominance
(determination, persistency, and ability to influence others) – in other words, a
persuasive politician must be good, clever, and strong.
Through observational and experimental studies on TV political debates, we
show that two ways can be adopted to acquire, increase, and maintain power in
debates, and to exert a higher political influence – to display one’s own power and
to diminish the opponent’s power. Yet, a “law of appearance” holds: it is not so
important that you are actually stronger than the other, but that the other believes
you are; in a word, the image of power is itself power.
Chapter 5 defines the notion of dominance as having more power than another,
and singles out various dominance strategies – ways to display one’s dominance by
words and body signals – some are explicit, such as speaking aloud or interrupting
others, others are subtle but effective, such as showing less care toward the other, as if
not considering him at all, or displaying easiness. Chapters 6 and 7 define charisma as
a particular form of dominance and, through experimental and observational studies,
single out the ingredients of its persuasive force and detect their display in the words,
voice, and gestures of various political leaders.
Chapters 8–14 deal with discredit, the action of lowering the opponent’s power
by spoiling his image. Chapters 8 and 9 show how politicians in political debates
launch criticisms, accusations, and insults to each other in terms of benevolence,
competence, and dominance, testing the relative effectiveness of different forms of
discredit and of their exploiting bodily communication or not. Chapter 10 focuses
on insults, their linguistic form, and their sociocognitive mechanisms: it defines them
within other types of aggressive communication, such as curse, imprecation, blas-
phemy, bad words, and analyzes real examples of insults on Facebook. Chapters
11–14 highlight the function of laughter in discredit, by analyzing the use of ridicule
and irony in political and judicial debates, and the cognitive, emotional, and social
processes implied in the production and comprehension of the parody of politicians.
Acknowledgments
A great part of the topics tackled in this book is drawn or inspired by the work we
conducted within the European Network of Excellence SSPNet (Social Signal
Processing Network, 2009–2014): this is why we are particularly grateful to
Alessandro Vinciarelli, his vision and foresight in devising this research area, and his
dedication as a tireless coordinator of that project. We are also indebted to Giovanna
Leone, with her constant and generous suggestions and insightful thought and her
capacity to always see the best in people; to Laura Vincze, who brightly shared a part
of that route with us; to Francesco Ferretti and Massimo Marraffa; and to Giuseppe
Mininni who friendly welcomed us in our Departments. Three charismatic figures
