Appeal to Emotion

Appeal to emotion is basically saying that you should believe something because of how you feel about it. It's a premise that is trying to convince someone to believe their argument by appealing to the person's emotion.

There are different aspects of appeals to emotion such as appeal to pity, appeal to fear, appeal to spite, and appeal to vanity.

Appeal to pity interested me the most because I see that a lot. Sometimes people try to convince someone of something by trying to get them to feel bad if they don't agree with what they say or if they don't agree with what they do. There are a lot of advertisements that do this. Just like in the last project we had to do for this class, my group did it on PETA and I found so many articles and ads that were trying to appeal to people's emotions by trying to get them to pity them. I read an article about the Ringling Brothers not taking proper care of their baby elephants that they use for their performances and they showed pictures and stated things to the degree of "if you don't do something now, these elephants will continue to be abused." They're trying to get people to support them by getting others to pity them. They use pictures and say things to get people to feel bad so that people could help them out, and this is implausible reasoning.