“Who Said That?” : A Quantitative Study on the Effect of Initial Ethos through Name Attribution

Sammanfattning

The purpose of this thesis is to see to what extent initial ethos affects audience statement evaluation, when it is only based on the recipient’s own previous knowledge and attitudes, activated through the attribution of the name of the sender. Some focus is also placed on what type of statements are more likely to be affected by name attribution in their evaluation. Previous research shows that the name of a well-known sender can influence how a statement is evaluated, that a sender’s reputation can shape persuasive outcomes independently of the actual and explicit content being communicated, and that source identity can affect how truthful a statement is perceived to be. However, the name of the sender is never presented alone with a statement, without either providing the sender’s reputation, information about the sender or full arguments, making it difficult to fully isolate the effect of the sender’s name. The thesis builds on a quantitative study as well as a topical analysis. A self-recruited group of participants were asked to evaluate quotes, visibly coming from either Donald Trump or Barack Obama in two versions of a survey. Half of the quotes purposefully had the wrong sender attributed to them, to see whether the quotes would be evaluated differently depending on the attributed sender. Analysis and results show a greater preference towards one of the senders when the quotes are divided by attributed sender, than when those same quotes are divided by true sender. They also showed that the quotes that received a generally larger point difference concerned more polarized issues. Probable reasons for the results can be found within the rhetorical field of identity theory, where both the identity of the recipient and the sender, shared or not, can have affected statement evaluation. In polarized issues the name more affects those who consider themselves opposed to the stated opinion, when it is attributed to the person associated with the opposite political side.