MECHANISMS OF THE PUBLIC SPEECH MANIPULATIVE INFLUENCE ON THE AUDIENCE

Abstract

The paper substantiates a systemic interdisciplinary planetary model depicting the mechanism of the public speaking impact on the audience viewed from the standpoint of speech energetics theory. The elementary unified graphic images of the psychic spheres of speaker’s and listeners’ spiritual being are divided in the model into three conditionally autonomous spheres (existential, mental, and transcendental). The model shows the way these spheres carry out self-developing cognitive processes of the interlocutors’ thinking-and-speaking and thinking-and-acting activities while communicating, that result in public speech manipulative effect. The model demonstrates that the adequate decoding of the public speech content is ensured only by the presence of a zone of the speaker’s and each listener’s common socio-cultural space. It is pointed out that, regardless of the listeners’ official social status, in real communication there are always some individuals with different levels of the internal culture: high, medium, and low. It is emphasised therefore that to attract the attention of the listeners of all cultural levels, a public leader should use various sets of verbal and non-verbal means that perform a manipulative influence. By way of examining the functional specificity of the energetic mechanisms of a stochastic self-development of the public speaker's thinking-and-speaking and thinking-and-acting processes while communicating with the audience, the authors show that the conceptual field of his/her memory is created on the basis of meaningful neuron-concepts that differ in the level of energy potential and are capable of forming the space of the speaker’s communicative culture while interacting with each other according to synergetics laws. By revealing the energetic mechanisms of the manipulative information generation and decoding, the authors prove that, firstly, speech is perceived by listeners in accordance with their cultural level viewed as an invariant unity of genetically innate and socially acquired energetic potentials of concepts-meanings accumulated in their memory throughout life. Secondly, the degree of public speech manipulative influence upon the audience depends on the energy resonance of concepts-meanings and concepts-emotions when broadcast to the audience, with the energy of similar concepts in the listeners’ memory. Thirdly, the generation of information by the public speaker’s psycho-cognitive system and its decoding by the listener are based on the same mechanisms, however performed in the reverse sequence. It is emphasised that the substantiated model can serve as a foundation for the development of methods for studying the psycho-energetic specificity of the speaker's manipulative influence upon the audience, as well as for the further conventional advancement and elaboration of the interdisciplinary notions of cognitive science.