The Power Of Persuasive Strategies: A Multimodal Analysis Of Mark Zuckerberg’s Verbal And Non-verbal Performance At The U.s.congress Hearing

In March 2018,when the Facebook-Cambridge Analysis scandal was exposed by the media,Facebook encountered the largest data breach in history.Within a week,the market value of Facebook has evaporated tens of billions of dollars.On May 10th2018,Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the Senate’s Commerce and Judiciary committees Tuesday to accept a series of inquiries from 44senators.After the hearing,Facebook’s stock price rebounded by nearly 5%,and Zuckerberg’s performance was unanimously praised by the public.Therefore,a thorough study of how Zuckerberg responded to the questions from the senators at the hearing,reversed the unfavorable situation and persuaded the public to regain their trust is of far-reaching significance for understanding persuasive strategies.Public speaking is an essential means of demonstrating one’s credibility,persuasiveness and personal quality.From the perspective of communication,persuasion is one of the most important factors in the relationship that public speakers would like to establish with their audience.The existing research on persuasion usually concentrates on political speeches,ignoring other public figures such as entrepreneurs.In the meanwhile,researchers tacitly equaled the persuasiveness of politicians to the conversational dominance over the past decades,paying little attention on other kinds of persuasive styles.However,recent studies found that a high level of humble relevance and a low orientation to dominance of the speaker can sometimes evoke more positive emotions from the audience than an aggressive style.Nevertheless,the existing research still did not pay enough attention on how to persuade the audience in a humble way when it comes to the study on persuasion.Within the theoretical framework of Aristotle’s rhetoric theory,which included three modes:ethos,pathos and logos,and supplemented by two other analytical models,the author conducted a multimodal analysis on the persuasive strategies used by Zuckerberg at the hearing.The author used the video of Mark Zuckerberg attending the U.S Congress hearing on May 10^th2018 as the research sample,combined qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate the language,gaze,voice and bodily gestures applied by Mark Zuckerberg.This thesis divided the persuasive strategies into two parts:rhetoric strategies and humble stance,and would analyze the rhetoric strategies applied in Zuckerberg’s language and gaze,as well as the humble stance embodied in his voice and bodily gestures.Through in-depth analysis,the author obtained several major findings.Zuckerberg applied persuasive skills in his testimony and gaze to persuade the committees at the hearing within the framework of Aristotelian Rhetoric Model.Zuckerberg mainly adopted emtional appeal and logical appeal in his statement to evoke the audience’s sympathy and influenced the audience’s emotion,to further persuade the audience that Facebook is a company which devoted to make the world closer and better.However,when answering various questions from the senators,Zuckerberg was focused on admitting his mistakes and making commitment to display his high moral character,including responsibility,reliability and trustworthiness,thus reversing the damaged image of Facebook.Regarding the humble stance shown in Zuckerberg’s voice,the major finding it that he displayed his humble stance only on some specific occasions rather than continually.Zuckerberg talked with several pauses and a relative thin and soft voice in his statement,which are signs of humble voice.When it comes to the answers,Zuckerberg did not convey much humble stance through his voice.As for the bodily gestures,the research results revealed that Zuckerberg was generally talking in a humble way but the information conveyed via bodily gestures depended on the context.