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Le pouvoir de l'image : persuasion, émotion et identification
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Hélène Joffe
The Power of Visual Material: Persuasion, Emotion and Identification
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The Power of Visual Material: Persuasion,
Emotion and Identification
Hélène Joffe
The mass media offer up a diet of visual material chosen to attract their audiences’
attention. Visuals are used not only to illustrate news and feature genres but also in
advertising and campaigns that attempt to persuade their target audiences to change
attitudes and behaviours. These include health, safety and charity campaigns.
Against this backdrop, one might expect a major body of social-scientific work to
have explored the impact of visual material on the public’s uptake of one or other
message. Yet empirical evidence concerning its impact is scarce across the social
sciences (Domke et al., 2002). Studies of visual material are marginalized (Radley,
2002). This paper forms part of a growing trend that reinvigorates interest in the
visual. Specifically, the paper aims to assimilate existing literature on the power of
the visual to persuade, as well as to raise issues concerning what audiences bring to
the messages and how this may interact with their influence. To this end the paper
draws upon studies of the visual in the humanities and social sciences. The emotive
power of the visual forms the focus of this review.
Qualities of the visual
A growing body of studies ascertains the qualities of visual material and how audiences
make sense of it. The studies draw an implicit (and sometimes explicit) contrast
made between visual and verbal/written material. They tend to highlight a core
aspect: visual material’s ability to arouse emotion.
The most salient distinction between the relative effects of textual/verbal versus
visual messages concerns their emotive impact. Visuals are thought to send people
along emotive pathways where textual/verbal material leaves them in a more
rational, logical and linear pathway of thought. For example, Iyer and Oldmeadow
(2006) found that people presented with visual material of the Kenneth Bigley kidCopyright
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DOI: 10.1177/0392192107087919
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napping, drawn from national newspapers, felt significantly more fear than those
who read about the kidnapping from the texts of the newspapers. Not only fear, but
also engagement and concern can be stirred by visuals. Boholm (1998) found that
visual components of news reportage of the 10th anniversary of Chernobyl across
five European countries elicited stronger emotional engagement on the part of audiences,
and imbued issues with stronger personal concern, than did texts. Boholm
links this, in part, to visual images having ‘a strong capacity to represent risks which
are remote from everyday experience, as being subjectively relevant’ (p. 127). He
surmises that this permits identification with their content.
Visual material appears to be especially memorable and the salience that this
confers may make it particularly forceful. This links to the vivid quality of visual
material. Psychological literature on social cognition is replete with mental strategies
whereby people make sense of their worlds. One finding is that people have
systematically biased perceptions whereby they overestimate low-frequency ‘vivid’
killers (and underestimate high-frequency quiet killers). ‘Information’ is deemed
vivid to the extent that it is: emotionally interesting; imagery provoking; and proximate
in a sensory, temporal or spatial way.
While this ‘vividness effect’ may not be robust in itself (see Taylor and Thompson,
1982) two related mental strategies are found to be so. The ‘salience effect’ posits that
when people’s attention is differentially directed to one portion of the environment
they tend to remember and hold that central when making subsequent judgements.
This may relate to the availability heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974), a
cornerstone of social cognition, which posits that an event is judged frequent or
probable to the extent that instances of it can be easily recalled from memory. Thus
the argument is that the emotive quality of visual material feeds its vividness. Vivid
visuals leave a rich and strong memory trace where less vivid information would
fade. This establishes the salience of what it portrays.
This empirical finding supports Boholm’s (1998) hypothesis that visuals can exert
a ‘positioning power’ on the viewer’s imagination, which may be resistant to commentaries
that challenge the feelings they produce. Visuals are readily absorbed in
an unmediated manner because viewers are not generally provoked to reflect on or
deconstruct them in the way that occurs in relation to verbal material. Debates are
often set up in the media concerning which side is ‘right’ in a controversy (e.g. in
terms of arguments in relation to whether the combined mumps, measles and
rubella vaccination can cause autism). Yet no analogous ‘debate’ is possible regarding
images. This links with a further quality of the visual: that it is able to verify the
authenticity of the story being told (Graber, 1996). Photographs (moving and still),
the salient category of visuals in the news media, confirm the ‘truth value’ of an
event. A key feature here is that someone has seen the referent in person, which
lends the sense that factual evidence has been provided for the event having
occurred (Barthes, 1977). This quality diminishes any chance of ‘debate’ about and
between visuals.
However, while one might argue that debate is inherently verbal/textual, one
could juxtapose images and leave people to ‘read’ the controversies for themselves.
An example of this would be the juxtaposition of images of people in the Arab world
rejoicing at the fall of the United States’ twin towers in 2001 alongside pictures of
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westerners in a state of shock. The idea that the people in these images respond in a
diametrically opposite way to the same visual event in accordance with their differing
identities speaks to the interpretive contribution that visuals demand. This
makes them polysemic. Individuals positioned in different groups are likely to have
differential responses to the same visuals, which may depend on factors such as their
empathy with the victims.1
In a sense, then, this opens up the possibility that the
emotive engagement and identification with suffering that the visual is said to elicit
will vary according to such differentials.
On the basis of these qualities of the visual – that it is emotive, absorbed in an
unmediated fashion, vivid and memorable, and ‘proves’ the authenticity of the event
depicted – one would expect it to be particularly powerful in shaping persuasive
messages.
Persuasion and tone
The link between persuasion and visual material is highlighted here by making use
of literature on health, safety and charity campaigns. A strong line of argument
proposes that persuasion is effected by bringing an audience into a state of emotion.
In terms of campaigns, those of the text-rich education-type have been superseded
by visual-rich social marketing. This shift reflects a body of evidence that information
alone does not attract people’s attention sufficiently to bring on the changes that
campaigns hope to effect. Rather, they have to be lured in and, to this end, visual
material is called upon.
The persuasive effects of campaigns evoking fear and humour have been the
subject of considerable empirical investigation. The history of commercial advertising
shows little use of fear to persuade audiences, yet efforts to change health and
safety-related behaviours frequently involve material of a threatening nature. There
is a history of oscillation between support for and refutation of the persuasive power
of fear in the research field. A major 1970s study of fear-evoking campaigns directed
towards increasing the use of seatbelts showed no such effect on seatbelt usage
(Robertson, 1976). This precipitated a trend in favour of stressing the benefits of
adopting health and safety behaviours instead. When fear evocation returned with a
vengeance in the 1980s with Aids (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) campaigns
the world over, interestingly again, in terms of effect, there was little evidence
for its success. On the contrary, the Swiss Aids campaign, widely seen as the most
effective (see Kocher, 1992), does not use fear and focuses instead on the benefits of
condom use for quality of life.
The continued use of strong fear evocation is evident in Britain in the health and
safety sphere. From anti-smoking campaigns that involve people dying of lung
disease to ‘think – kill your speed’ campaigns to tackle speeding on the roads, fear is
used to persuade people to adopt healthy and safe behaviours and to dissuade them
from practices deemed unhealthy and unsafe. While long-term evaluative studies of
such contemporary campaigns are in the making, one might argue that they have
ignored evidence that fear interferes with both attention and retention (Lazarus,
1980) and induces viewers to look away (Geller, 1989). On the other hand much of
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the empirical work pointing to the negative impact of fear-evocation campaigns is
dated. Contemporary work points to the useful effects of fear, particularly when
accompanied by messages concerning the efficacy of preventive actions (Witte and
Allen, 2000). Fear-evoking visuals dominate horror, thriller and action-film genres,
all of which appeal to viewers. Furthermore, the ‘looking away’ that fear is said to
induce might more accurately be linked with feelings of disgust.
Disgust, a surprisingly under-explored emotion (Curtis and Biran, 2001), is one of
the universal, basic emotions, alongside fear, happiness, sadness, anger and surprise
(see Zajonc, 1998). ‘Basic’ emotions are basic because they are not composites of any
others. Disgust is provoked most intensely by seeing (or touching or ingesting) body
waste and other body matter. ‘Disgust stimuli’ also include death and poor hygiene
(Rozin and Fallon, 1987). Responses to it include gagging, nausea, recoil and taking
offence. Since the visual aspects of many contemporary health and safety campaigns,
as well as those representing disasters, use disgust-evoking imagery, this paper
turns to exploration of both its persuasive and dissuasive impacts.
Contemporary health campaigns draw heavily on disgust-evoking material. The
British media anti-smoking messages of the past few years have represented cigarettes
as arteries oozing with cholesterol/fat and shown a human heart with smoke
pouring out of it. The intention appears to be to bring people into a state of disgust
by drawing them in to look at body matter out of place. Like past anti-smoking
messages that have represented the smoker’s mouth as an ashtray, the contemporary
campaigns show an attractive young woman with deep wrinkles around her mouth,
which the accompanying text disambiguates as ‘cat’s-bum mouth’. Another depicts
an otherwise attractive young woman with very stained and uneven teeth. Again, in
line with past campaigns, smokers are also shown as almost-dead, diseased people.
Such portrayals appear to reflect beliefs, on the part of those devising the campaigns,
that elicitation of disgust will stop smokers from smoking and/or non-smokers from
taking up smoking.
If disgust elicits looking away, why is it used so copiously by the news media who
want to attract viewers, and the health campaigners who want to engage people in
messages about the harm they are doing to themselves? One aspect of this answer
lies in disgusting objects’ ability to ‘stick in the mind’ or imprint themselves. To
understand this one can generalize from Rozin and Fallon’s (1987) findings regarding
how people become disgusted by certain foods. Certain ‘offensive objects’ (e.g. a
hair, a nail) become ‘contaminants; that is, if they even briefly contact an acceptable
food, they tend to render that food unacceptable’ (Rozin and Fallon, 1987: 23). In
other words, physical contact between an acceptable food and a disgust substance
causes rejection of the acceptable food, and this is referred to as contamination. This
is linked with Nemeroff and Rozin’s (1994) notion of magical contagion. Moving
beyond the food arena, a practice such as smoking becomes a contaminated entity
when tainted with death and other disgust-inducing associations. Persuasive
messages that use disgust play not only on a visceral gut-level of response but on a
magical-thinking realm. For all of these reasons a sense of disgust stays with one and
can rub off onto previously acceptable entities. It is therefore a potentially powerful
tool for those who seek to persuade and dissuade.
The power of the disgust-inducing visual is well illustrated in Kitzinger’s (1995)
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study of Aids in Britain. Early media images of Aids emphasized a particular ‘face
of Aids’, namely, the degeneration of the body that it engendered or the ‘visual
representation of acute debilitation’ (p. 62). ‘Before’ and ‘after’ pictures were shown
of both ordinary people and celebrities with Aids. Attractive gay men, in particular,
characterized the ‘before’ pictures; in the ‘after’ pictures they had become emaciated,
‘walking-dead’ type characters.
Kitzinger characterizes the early Aids reporting as the ravaged ‘face of Aids’
period. She questions why the media dwelled on such images and answers that they
drew on a particular genre of photography wherein the attempt to be eye-catching is
realized by way of emphasizing the grotesque consequences of illness. This genre, in
the case of Aids, serves to illustrate (and warn people of) the consequences of the
‘deviant’ lifestyle associated with Aids. Here ‘The portrayal of physical affliction is
intertwined with notions of sin, punishment, damnation and repentance’ (Kitzinger,
1995: 53). By drawing on a genre of photography and of the horror film, these images
tap a cultural repertoire in which looking different makes one villainous and threatening.
They also objectify and dehumanize the victims as ‘vegetables’ and ‘living
skeletons’.
Kitzinger’s point is that it is not just the media that adopt these images but the
public too. Drawing on a large focus-group-based study she finds that the grotesque
or ‘yuck’ photographs are those most remembered. They are the ones that have come
to represent Aids in many people’s minds. People explicitly state that these images
come from the media. The exaggerated salience of such images derives, according to
her participants, from their ‘disgusting’ and ‘horrible’ nature. Kitzinger’s finding
augments the contention that the disgusting visual imprints itself and rubs off onto
that which it portrays.
What is the particular interplay of the media image and lay uptake in the persuasive
process? Kitzinger’s conceptualization of this is among the more sophisticated
renditions of the relationship between the media and their audience. For her, the
persuasive power of the media on their audiences lies in the ‘yuck’ images capturing
lay people’s imaginations for the same reason as they do the media’s. These images
are then further imprinted into the audience’s memory by the way they get invoked
and replayed in day-to-day interaction. For example, some of her focus-group
participants report playing a ‘spot the Aids victim’ game, in which they speculate
about the HIV status of people in their environments. Some act out the ‘face of Aids’
with contorted faces, drooling and so on. Their relish in reproducing such images
suggests a fascination with what disgusts them (see also Joffe, 1999, regarding this
theme). Kitzinger reports that some of her focus groups thought that such images
would persuade people to take precautions against Aids. Others surmised that the
images would make people feel fearful and turn away.
Disgusting visuals, such as those used in the British anti-smoking and Aids
campaigns, may aim to persuade and dissuade in another way too. They may intend
to shroud behaviour in disgust to produce its stigmatization in the social environment.
Using the definition of stigma as a ‘mark of social disgrace’ a la Goffman
(1963), the behaviour then becomes a marker of social disgrace that acts on individuals
who behave in this way or plan to. Thus persuasion and dissuasion via disgust
can operate indirectly.
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Another way of answering a question as to why those behind persuasive
messages use disgust-evoking imagery despite knowledge that it elicits recoil is that
such imagery may not induce recoil. Radley (2002) proposes that visuals force
people to engage with their own emotions. Analysing the trend for greater openness
in the portrayal of post-surgery bodies, he hypothesizes that to look is to have one’s
affective state changed – be it in disgust, horror and/or fear. To look is also to be
brought into a new relationship with the object of one’s vision, and perhaps, thereby,
to overcome one’s disgust and fear regarding it. Here the assumption is that the
fearful and/or disgusting stimulus is engaging, as a range of film genres and news
images bears out.
Persuasion and content
Beyond the realm of emotional tone, much contemporary thinking on persuasion
derives from studies exploring types of visuals that persuade viewers to give to the
charities associated with those portrayed. The paper turns to exploration of the persuasive
power of the differing types of visual material.
People donate more than double when asked to give money for an individual
about whom they have been given some personal information, compared to having
been fed statistics (Small et al., 2005). Interestingly, feeling and compassion diminish
as soon as one starts to add more people, even just an extra one, to the ‘single
identified victim’. Depiction of an identified individual victim appears to be highly
emotionally evocative and this may motivate distress and, consequently, donations
(see Kogut and Ritov, 2005).
The power of the visual, in terms of national and international issues, needs to be
set within a climate where people have been force-fed statistics and have statistics
fatigue (Slovic, 2006). The problem with a statistic is that it conveys so little about the
people it represents – what they feel, how they sound and look. It is not surprising,
then, that visuals often strike us more emotively than numbers. In some sense the
visual provides a counterpoint to the statistic – particularly in terms of being distinctively
emotive – where text and figures speak to more rational pathways of
thought. Without affect, information lacks meaning (Zajonc, 1998) and will not be
used for judgement and decision-making; thus affect is a key ingredient in decisionmaking,
such as deciding whether to give to a particular disaster fund.
Beyond the role played by pictures of the ‘individual identified victim’ in persuading
people to donate to charities, the type of ‘victim’ also plays a part. Examining
the interaction between charity poster campaigns related to disability and the
people viewing them Eayrs and Ellis (1990) show that people intend to give more
money when presented with posters depicting children rather than adults. Images of
disabled children may evoke particular emotions, such as the distress (see Kogut and
Ritov, 2005) which may play a role in intentions to donate.
Thus far various qualities of visual information have been found to make it
persuasive. However, no attention has been paid to differences within viewer
groups. Are there different ways in which different groups can be persuaded to give
money to charity? Regarding charity poster campaigns, Radley and Kennedy (1992)
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showed that people from higher socio-economic status (SES) groups resented pityevoking
images and preferred the promotion of equal rights for people with
disabilities. On the other hand, lower SES people were moved by posters evoking
pity and touching a personal chord. This provides an inroad into how positioning
and identification can play a role in the way visual messages are ‘read’. Thus it is not
just the qualities of emotional tone and content of the visual that are determinants of
its persuasive impact, but the positioning and identification of the viewer. This will
be further demonstrated by way of the findings from a study of British people’s
representations of the Ebola virus.
Persuasive impacts, emotional tone and identification: a study of
representations of the Ebola virus
Since we experience media in terms of a mix of visuals, texts and sometimes sounds,
the visual component cannot be studied in isolation. Bearing this in mind, findings
from a study of visuals and texts in British newspaper depictions of the Ebola virus
are brought to light. Ebola is a virus named after the Ebola River in the Democratic
Republic of Congo (DRC) where the first of many known outbreaks occurred in 1976.
It is passed on via bodily fluids, there is no cure or vaccine for it and it tends to lead
to a swift death. The DRC outbreak in 1995 received considerable attention in the
British media and a study set out to examine the interplay of this media material and
British lay thinking in the construction of representations of this virus. Media articles
and their accompanying visuals were content analysed alongside a thematic analysis
of interviews with British readers in which they were asked to talk about what
came to mind when they heard the term ‘Ebola virus’. The study (Joffe and Haarhoff,
2002) investigated what social representations British national newspapers had
helped to cultivate in lay thinking regarding the Ebola virus at the time of the mid-
1990s outbreak.
The results showed that in both the newspaper texts and the readers’ talk Ebola
was located as an African disease. While the tabloids (‘low-brow’ newspapers) and
their readers focused on what were seen as inherent features of the generalized place
– Africa – which they linked with ongoing disaster, broadsheets (‘high-brow’ newspapers)
and their readers tended to talk of how Africa’s structural features (e.g.
health system, poverty, war) had contributed to the spread of Ebola.
This partially shared picture of origin, across the media and audiences, can be
juxtaposed with major differences between media and lay perspectives in terms of
emotive involvement. Newspapers sensationalized and globalized the risk from
Ebola and then reassured audiences about the West’s ability to control it. Reader talk
was simply detached, with explicit mention of containment, self-limitation and the
remoteness of Ebola from the space of the self.
One or multiple visuals accompanied just over a quarter of the articles analysed:
The main visuals seen by those who read the tabloid newspapers were of teams of
westerners, in hermetically sealed outfits, who went into Zaire to contain Ebola.
Those reading broadsheet newspapers would have been most likely to see medical
science-type pictures of a virus, sometimes with western scientists handling it in proDiogenes
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tective clothing. Notably, there were no images of bodies of the dead and dying, but
there were a few of the following: portraits of westerners – particularly a nun – who
had died of Ebola; maps of Africa; and two images of people looking fearful (only in
the broadsheet newspapers).
While science fiction was not mentioned directly in the texts of the newspaper
articles, the hermetically sealed protective clothing, seen by those reading articles
accompanied by visuals, may have imprinted on readers a certain way of thinking
about Ebola. Indeed a number of the participants talked of having seen sciencefiction-type
visuals depicting Ebola. The medics in the pictures looked like astronauts
on a space mission. Furthermore, the film Outbreak, widely disseminated at the
time, and representing an Ebola-like virus in science-fiction terms, may have been
seen by the sample. The visual symbols in which Ebola was couched may have
played a critical role in the detached sensibility that lay people expressed in relation
to Ebola. Not only was Ebola ‘out there’ in Africa and controllable by western
science, it was part of a world of make-believe, of science fiction.
In relation to the literature on qualities of the visual, the Ebola visuals may have
had a ‘positioning power’ or primacy in terms of forging the sample’s representation
of Ebola but, in persuasive communication, visuals usually accompany some form of
text. One might posit that they ‘do something to’ the textual message. They may
highlight a specific feature and steer the reader to its salience. The Ebola study
suggests that while texts talk in a sensationalist manner about globalization of a
‘doomsday’ disease and the potential for its containment, the most prevalent images
contain western astronaut-type disease-control teams tackling Ebola. When asked
about Ebola, many readers think of it as a science-fiction-type illness, with connotations
of a fictional universe which, consequently, arouses little sense of fear for themselves
or empathy for its victims.
Not only have the visuals had a ‘positioning power’ in forging representations,
the viewers’ identification – as white Britons responding to an illness that had
affected Africa, in the main – seems to have played a part in their detachment; the
visual material produced distancing rather than the engagement and identification
presupposed by the literature on the visual. Thus the content and tone of visuals
appear to interact with identifications to produce engagement and concern or
detachment and apathy.
Psychological research has focused on identity, but not on identification. The
literature on degree of identification with particular groups (e.g. one’s nation, categories
such as ‘westerners’ and even gender groups) is under-developed. There is a
need to examine how a person’s identification with visual material impacts upon the
anxiety evoked in relation to it and the meaning constructed from it. If the sufferer
of an illness portrayed in a photograph is seen as similar to oneself, does this increase
one’s empathy with him or her? Future research might gain a greater understanding
of the mechanisms by which people detach themselves from, and identify with,
visual material, and link this to persuasive impact.
The Ebola study casts light on a number of additional aspects of the media–mind
link. The first is that audiences approach media not as blank slates ready to be
imprinted with one or another idea, but with an ‘already known’ (see Kitzinger,
1998). Media ‘signals’ are taken up according to people’s existing ideas. What audiJoffe:
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ences already know leads them to selectively highlight, oppose or reconstruct ideas
witnessed in the mass media. Second, and related to this, the motivation to see or
represent something in one or another way stems from, among other functions, a
need for identity protection (Moscovici, 1961/1976). Those representations widely
shared among groups function as a means of collective coping with threat; people
represent threats in ways that protect the self and the in-group (see Joffe, 1999). In
terms of Aids, Ebola and a host of other potential changes brought to attention by the
media, dis-identification with the risk fosters protection because it confers immunity
from the threat.
Concluding thoughts
This paper has integrated literature forged within the social sciences and humanities
concerning the persuasive impact of visual material, highlighting issues of emotion
and identification. Where once the mass media relied heavily on textual information
they have shifted, increasingly, to the use of visual material. This is highly apparent
not only in the news media but in health, safety and charity campaigns that attempt
to socially engineer change in people’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. With the
increasing presence of such visuals comes a more emotive media environment
with which people find themselves forced to engage, and, under certain circumstances,
disengage.
Hélène Joffe
University College London
Notes
1. One might contend that the response to a textual commentary also varies according to the positioning
of the individual who reads or hears it.
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