Abstract:

As Bakhtin argues that understanding of utterances is established by dialogue between the speaker's voice and the listener's voice. In other words, the listener internally generates "questioning" voices (voices such as questions, approvals, and criticisms) one after another regarding the content of the speaker's remarks, and listens while searching for the answer in the remarks. If the message presented by the speaker can give an answer to each of these various voices, the listener can be convinced of the idea. Considering this way, the persuasiveness of the message is determined by how richly the voices of stakeholders can be assumed in advance and how to deal with those voices can be incorporated.

Given the above, it can be said that training in imagining stakeholders and virtually conversing with them will improve the quality of persuasion. But this is not easy. In this virtual conversation, the presenters need to understand the stakeholders empathically and then establish agreements and cooperative relationship with the stakeholders only through their imagination. Moreover, the most formidable but important stakeholders in persuading are hostile stakeholders who criticize and deny the speakers' claims. We are generally unable to understand our enemies empathically and to converse in a friendly mood.

To solve this problem of imagined hostile-stakeholder contact, the authors propose the "Imagined interview script construction method" as a training method for empathically understanding and interacting with hostile stakeholders. This method seeks to achieve empathic understanding and dialogue with hostile stakeholders exploiting a communication pattern of interviews. In this method, the learner is to set a personality, or viewpoint as a third-party interviewer within him/herself and constructs a written script of a imagined interview with the hostile stakeholders. For him/herself, the hostile stakeholders are just "enemy" with few opportunity of peaceful communication. However, from the standpoint of a neutral interviewer, the hostile stakeholder is a person with a particular opinion. This nature of the interview leads the learner to converse with the stakeholder and try to understand him/her. Furthermore, the interview is not a debate, but basically a linguistic activity to draw out the ideas and experiences of the interviewee through friendly conversation, clarify the background of the interviewee's opinion while understanding his/her personality. Therefore, the activity of composing imagined interviews with stakeholders who are hostile is expected to enhance sympathetically understanding of the background of the opinions of hostile stakeholders and the values behind them, thus establish the foundation upon which the learners to seek agreement rather than refutation against them. This method is expected to help generate a persuasive messages.

The effect of this method was examined using university classes. This experiment showed that the method facilitated the assumption of a hostile stakeholder figure, thereby empathizing with the background of their claim. It was also revealed that this activity enhances intimacy with hostile stakeholders. In the future, we will analyze multiple cases to clarify the effects and limitations of this method and then improve the method.

Keywords:

Presentation education, persuasion, diaglogism, imagined hostile-stakeholder contact, interview script construction.