The Effects of Passive Verb-Constructed Arguments on Persuasion

Abstract

Different types of verb voice in a sentence were examined as a possible simple cue within the unimodel of persuasion (Kruglanski & Thompson, 1999). An experiment was constructed by inducing two levels of argument strength (strong vs. weak) fully crossed with three verb voice types in an independent groups design with 242 participants. Evidence was found consistent with the prediction that verb voice acts as a simple persuasion cue; the audience's enjoyment of reading the arguments was found to be a mediator of the relationship between verb type and message acceptance.

Keywords:

• Cognition
• Language
• Persuasion

Notes

Note. The upper triangle reports the uncorrected correlations, and the lower triangle reports the corrected correlations.

The article went on to explain different ways to use a verb in a sentence. When using the active voice, the writer of a sentence puts the agent before the verb and the object is placed after the verb. An active voice sentence is, “The elephant trampled the trees” (Pruitt, 1968, p. 462). The elephant is the agent and the trees are the object in this sentence. The passive voice with the agent present puts the object of the action first and the agent after the verb, producing a sentence like, “The trees were trampled by the elephant” (p. 462). The agent is still present, but it is moved further into the sentence. The third type of verb voice is the passive voice with the agent missing, where the target of the action is put first and the agent is removed from the sentence entirely as in, “The trees were trampled” (p. 462). A sentence can be written in the active or passive voice, and the passive voice can include the agent or not.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher J. Carpenter

Christopher J. Carpenter (PhD, Michigan State University, 2010) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Western Illinois University.

David Dryden Henningsen

David Dryden Henningsen (PhD, University of Wisconsin, 1999) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northern Illinois University.