Page 408 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

Chapter 14 Persuasive Speaking 375

Effective speakers
adapt their message to
the cultural back-
grounds of audience
members.

Demographic Background

When possible, cultural knowledge should be complemented with information
about demographic diversity present in your audience. Is your student body rel-
atively homogenous in terms of socioeconomic background? What’s the average
age on campus? Is your school a residential or commuter campus? Is there any
level of political activity on your campus? Does religion play an obvious role in
campus life? What about sports? All of these questions are relevant to the demo-
graphic profi le of your campus. Answers to these questions, moreover, contain
clues rich in information about what you can reasonably hope to achieve in per-
suading the members of the student body who make up your audience.

Individual Background

The people we know best are the ones we know on a psychological level. Given
relatively intimate details about their most deeply held needs, hopes, and fears,
we are able to better share in their worldview. In turn, this enables us to better
predict how they are most likely to respond to our attempts at infl uencing them.
Because we cannot know everyone on such an intimate level, we often infer
what it is about people that make them psychologically unique. These inferences
tend to be based on our knowledge of their cultural and demographic back-
ground. Conclusions about attitudes, beliefs, and values, for example, are fre-
quently based on what we know about a person’s geographic origins and socio-
economic class. Thus, we infer that a person who grew up in an affl uent suburb
must have different attitudes, beliefs, and values than a person who grew up with