Speech transforms the world on a daily basis. From words that demanded justice to words that inspired resolve, political and social change has been brought about by the right words at the right time.
A lot of resources out there will tell you that speeches like these move people because they are authentic or structured in a certain way. The reality is that an effective speech isn’t produced by following a set of rules. The context of every speech is different. The tools at every speaker’s disposal are different.
What doesn’t change, however, is the psychology of speech. In this article, we explore common psychological techniques used in speeches and how speakers use them to inspire and motivate change.
The Drivers of Human Behavior
To motivate others, speakers first need to understand the psychology of motivation, which is an internal mechanism that manifests itself in different ways. These varying types of motivation can be incorporated into the message to connect deeply with audiences and inspire action.
This motivation is only heightened by effective storytelling. Human beings resonate with compelling narratives, and many of the greatest speeches across history have used that power to compel audiences to take action.
Let’s start by examining the two main types of motivation. Then, we’ll move on to storytelling and how it can take a speech to the next level.
Extrinsic Motivation
Extrinsic motivation is what most people think of when discussing what motivates them. It was developed as a concept during the 1940s and ’50s and refers to external rewards and punishments for behavior, such as:
- A special treat for participating in an event.
- A cash prize for turning in a felon.
- A raise for exceptional job performance.
This type of motivation can affect everyone, from high-ranking employees to young children. It even works on animals, as demonstrated by the famous Skinner box — psychologist B.F. Skinner used the box to train rats by rewarding certain behaviors.
Speakers often use extrinsic motivation by promising that external rewards will follow as a result of desired behaviors. For example, a politician might promise to lower prices or improve healthcare services to encourage voters to support them. They may also discuss the problems that will arise if people vote for their opponent. Either way, they’re using the promise of extrinsic motivators to encourage specific behaviors.
Intrinsic Motivation
Whereas extrinsic motivation comes from outside the individual, intrinsic motivation comes from within. In many ways, it’s the most powerful form of motivation. While extrinsic motivation can be effective, rewards and punishments can lose their power over time. The audience then loses motivation.
Intrinsic motivation doesn’t wane so easily because it comes from the character of the person. Author Daniel H. Pink argues in his book “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” that this motivation can be divided into three forms:
- Autonomy: A desire for freedom and mobility can motivate action. For instance, many teenagers intrinsically want to own a car so they can have more freedom. While there are external rewards that accompany the vehicle, the baseline motivation comes from a need to be independent. Gaining that independence means their external world becomes aligned with their internal one, and the idea of that alignment motivates change.
- Mastery: Learning and mastering new things is intrinsically appealing to human beings. It’s satisfying to develop a new skill or succeed when you weren’t sure you could. In many cases, these feelings of satisfaction can be even more powerful than the happiness you feel upon receiving a physical reward. This is because the brain releases dopamine upon the completion of goals, and the harder the task, the more powerful the satisfaction.
- Purpose: Human beings crave meaning. Our pursuit of that meaning often leads us to change jobs, move across the world, and pursue new relationships. These activities give us a context in which to live. They give us goals to pursue, and the pursuit of a goal becomes an end in itself that is rewarding to gratify. It also eases the anxiety and discomfort that can come with aimlessness. Purpose can also extend to groups and lead to self-motivated collective action.
Autonomy, mastery, and purpose can all be leveraged within the context of professional communication. Doing so requires connecting with the audience’s goals, challenges, and aspirations. Mastery, in particular, is something employees or teams must be willing and able to pursue themselves. Therefore, it becomes the speaker’s role to build a framework that makes that pursuit feel possible and worthwhile.
Here’s an example. A CEO is addressing their team about the company’s future. They might speak about how developing new skills expands individual potential and drives innovation. They might emphasize how each person’s contribution helps shape the organization’s purpose and impact. While these may sound like business objectives, the deeper motivation comes from within. That internal drive is what transforms a company’s vision into reality.
Intrinsic motivation like this is so powerful because it isn’t forced on the audience through external means. Instead, they’re doing something because they want to satisfy a core need within themselves. That motivation is far stronger than the one generated by promises or punishments. As such, speeches that align with the intrinsic needs of their audience tend to be more effective.
The Story
Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in a speaker’s kit, and it doesn’t always need to involve literally relaying a series of events. It could be laying out reasons for believing in something. It could be exploring and questioning one’s own motivations or those of an audience. Essentially, any sequence of interconnected thoughts can be a story, so long as progress and decisions are made.
These stories have tremendous power to influence audiences, and that’s because of their direct impact on the human brain. Human beings are naturally drawn to stories. When one person tells a story to another, a process called neural coupling, or neural synchrony, occurs. Their neural activity literally begins to sync up as the audience listens to the speaker. They enter a state where experience is shared and mirrored back and forth.
Effective storytelling and verbal communication in general achieve this effect, but the most effective speeches provoke a stronger connection. They can even encourage the release of oxytocin and decrease the release of cortisol. Oxytocin has numerous effects, but for our purposes, the most important is that it encourages feelings of trust and connection. Cortisol is related to feelings of stress and regulates blood pressure, among other things.
Ultimately, effective storytelling builds trust and eases stress. It invites the audience into the speaker’s perspective and helps them connect emotionally with the actual content of the speech. Stories are also easier to remember than a string of facts or disconnected propositions. All these factors make the audience more likely to respond to speech content through action, which is the goal for many speakers.
As such, including stories is almost always a good idea. Whether it’s relaying a relevant personal experience or weaving together a historical narrative that provides context for the situation, stories have a deep power to connect with people and motivate action.
Building Trust with an Audience
We’ve examined the psychology of the audience and how speakers can use that to their advantage. But how do speakers truly build trust with an audience? If they mistrust an audience, it doesn’t matter what stories they tell or what strategies they talk about. Audiences won’t want to listen.
This mistrust can be especially dangerous if it starts to spread subconsciously through an audience. The group dynamics of the crowd propagate emotion rapidly, especially since they’re all directing their attention toward the same place. The best speakers interact with those invisible dynamics and use them to their advantage. They build trust and rapport with the crowd as a whole, and that heightens the power of their message.
Actually working the crowd in these ways is challenging, but speakers use social proof and credibility to make that connection easier to build.
Social Proof
Have you ever heard of the mere exposure effect? It’s the idea that people are more likely to choose what they’re familiar with over what they aren’t. For example, if you were to go to the grocery store for soda, you’re far more likely to select a familiar brand name versus one you’ve never seen before.
Social proof is an extension of this idea, except it’s other people who are creating the favorable feelings rather than your own familiarity with the subject. You look to them to see their reactions and base your perception on that.
For example, let’s say you walk into the same soda aisle as always, but you see a dozen people grabbing sodas from one specific brand one day. Would you join them to try to understand the excitement, or would you grab your regular soda and miss out?
That’s the power of social proof. It forces people to consider things they wouldn’t otherwise because it’s impossible to ignore the crowd entirely. Speakers can use social proof to strengthen their credibility, too. For example, speakers might:
- Incorporate case studies and specific examples within a speech.
- Reference well-known figures whose names carry weight with an audience.
- Ask the audience to raise their hands or otherwise express support visually for a given idea, product or experience.
- Leave space for audiences to cheer or laugh so they can respond directly and showcase how they’re feeling to others.
Speaker Credibility
Credibility is also earned and projected by the speaker. For many, it starts with a credential, such as a title, degree, or list of accomplishments. Building credibility doesn’t stop there, however. Speakers gain or lose credibility based on word choice, tone, style, appearance, and their command of the subject matter.
These factors may sound like a lot to manage, but they can enhance one another because of the halo effect. This is a psychological phenomenon in which people map their generalized positive feelings about a given subject onto smaller elements of the subject. For instance, someone might have deep respect for an athlete and place a heavier weight on that athlete’s non-sports-related opinions, even if those opinions aren’t particularly thoughtful or well-reasoned.
- A speaker can leverage the halo effect by building momentum and goodwill via their rhetorical choices.
- When they dress in ways that appeal to their audience, they show an understanding of the event and the audience’s expectations.
- When they cite relevant thinkers in the field, they display expertise and show the audience they can trust them.
- When they’re sensitive to the audience’s emotions, they show that they understand their perspective, even as it shifts.
Each positive rhetorical choice builds rapport and strengthens the effect of the other choices. Even something small like admitting an error shows a commitment to honesty that can lead to a deep connection with the audience. Altogether, a speakers choices can compound into a trust that increases a message’s effectiveness and the likelihood that the audience will stand up and take action.
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