Abstract:

This study proposes a method for facilitating empathic understanding of hostile others in learning persuasive presentations and reports on the results of evaluation of the method in a university class. The presence of hostile parties makes persuasive presentations difficult. In this paper, the hostile means the person who strongly opposes the presenter's argument. I many cases, the opposition is expressed aggressively. This hostility is based on the emotional background that includes individual resentment and rancor. Consequently, just making a logical coutercharge is not sufficient to persuade the hostiles. The keys to persuade such hostiles is to understand their emotional background empathically and seek a way to reach a consensus with them instead of refuting. In real-life persuasion, it is not uncommon to be asked to deal with such hostile parties. However, until now, training of presentation in school has not often focused on learning how to deal with such adversaries. Therefore, this study aims to establish a method to promote empathic understanding of hostile others as the foundation of persuasive presentation to hostile others.

For this purpose, the present study proposes the method called "Decisive Past Episodes Dramatization method (DPED)". In this method, learners are to imagine the crucial past episodes on which the formation of respective hostiles' resentments was based and to script the scene, and then to act out the script with other students. This method is designed based on previous research on perspective-taking through theatrical techniques and empathetic understanding of others through acting out their life histories.

This method was evaluated in a presentation class at a university. Participants were 35 undergraduate students. They were free to choose what they wanted to argue, and then they assumed a fictitious personality X as the most hostile other to their argument. Then, they engaged in DPED. In order to confirm the effectiveness of this method, an impression evaluation survey of X was conducted before and after the DPED activity. The impression evaluation was conducted using the IOS (Inclusion of Others in Self) scale, which measures subjective distance between each learner and his/her X, and 5-point scale on 13 impression evaluation words. The results showed that the distance between the students and their X became significantly closer after the activity. Among the impression evaluation words, the scores for familiarity, likability, and cooperativeness increased after the activity. However, impressions related to cognitive abilities such as judgment, fairness, and the amount of knowledge did not change between pre and post.

The results show that the method proposed here reduced the psychological distance between the student and the adversary and reduced hostility and aversion toward the adversary. From this result, it can be concluded that the proposed method would help learners to form the foundation on which they can empathically understand the assumed adversary and search for the way to consensus. Detailed analysis of impression change and qualitative investigation on how DPED improves the contents of their presentation slides are our future works.

Keywords:

Presentation education, persuasion, empathetic understanding of others, hostile others, drama.