Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

358 Conclusion

In the fi nal section of the book, we come to understand that our audiences’ emotions need

not be viewed as antithetical to rational decision making. Instead, this section invites us to view

the audience’s emotions as essential to rationality and to admit that emotions quickly focus the

audience’s attention on the things that matter most to them. Taken together, the book’s three sec-

tions present a 360° view of audience decision making, a view that offers us our best chance to be

persuasive.

In addition to helping us become more persuasive, there is another equally important reason

why we as professionals need to know, as precisely as possible, how our audiences make decisions—

so that we can help them make good ones. Bad decisions can be very costly for those audiences

who depend on our documents and presentations for critical information. Investors who make bad

investment decisions can go bankrupt. Borrowers who make bad borrowing decisions can fi nd

themselves facing onerous payment schedules as well as exorbitant fees and interest rates. Medi-

cal patients who fail to make the necessary usage decisions can jeopardize their own and others’

physical safety. Currently, relatively few documents and presentations are designed in such a way as

to help their audiences make good decisions. Even the best documents and presentations typically

contain a great deal of information that is superfl uous to the audience’s decision. And although the

language they use is typically grammatically correct and may even be easy to comprehend, most

will lack much of the information that the audience needs to make a good decision. Oftentimes

professionals do not realize that their audiences read documents and listen to presentations in order

to make decisions. Many times professionals themselves do not know how to make a good decision

of the type their audience needs to make.

Evidence suggests that the average professional may be no better at anticipating the information

needs of an audience than is the average undergraduate student. For example, in what was intended

to be a study of the differences between expert and novice business writers, a researcher gave execu-

tives and undergraduates a business case and asked both groups to write and then revise a report to

the client in the case.^3 Contrary to the researcher’s expectations, the executives made neither more

nor better points in their reports than the undergraduates did. The executives’ performance in the

study is less surprising when we consider the state of audience awareness in the fi eld of decision

support systems—a computer science fi eld ostensibly dedicated to supporting good decisions in

audiences. Incredibly, system designers “are rarely told what the key decisions are that the system

must help the operator make” or how the operator will make them.^4

Clearly the time has come for professionals in every fi eld to form an accurate picture of audience

decision making. To do so promises high returns to any professional, organization, or student of

communication who can put the lessons of this book into practice—returns in the form of greater

trust, respect, and long-term success.

Notes

1 Anderson, J. R. (2000, p. 351). Cognitive psychology and its implications (5th ed.). New York: Worth Publishers.
2 Schneider, S. L., & Shanteau, J. (2003, pp. 1–2). Introduction: Where to decision making? In S. Schneider &
J. Shanteau (Eds.), Emerging perspectives on judgment and decision research (pp. 1–10). Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
3 Garay, M. S. (1988). Writers making points: A case study of executives and college students revising their
own reports (Doctoral dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University, 1988). Dissertation Abstracts International,
49 (12A), 3645.
4 Klein, G. A. (1998, p. 107). Sources of power: How people make decisions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.