How Ethos and Pathos Appeals Resonate in Reader Interpretations of Social Media Messages
For researchers in computational rhetoric and social media analysis, this work provides a method to study the impact of rhetorical appeals on the silent majority of readers, revealing that interpretations often diverge from original messages.
The study investigates how ethos and pathos appeals in social media messages resonate with silent readers, finding that interpretations diverge from original sentences in 30% of cases and that rhetorically charged content elicits greater variability, with ethos and pathos predicting audience attitudes toward the author.
Rhetorical strategies and their influence on audiences are often studied through social media posts and comments. However, this focus overlooks the universal audience, which is the majority of readers who remain silent and do not explicitly express how a message affects them. This study investigates how two classical modes of persuasion, ethos and pathos, resonate in the silent audience's interpretations of meaning. Using a dataset of social media sentences paired with human-written interpretations, we label both sources for ethos and pathos and assess whether these rhetorical appeals are preserved. Our analyses show that interpretations diverge from the original sentences in 30% of cases, with rhetorically charged content eliciting greater variability than neutral content. We further find that ethos and pathos in original sentences can predict audience attitudes toward the author, underscoring the subtle ways rhetoric shapes perception beyond visible engagement.