How Ethos and Pathos Appeals Resonate in Reader Interpretations of Social Media Messages

2026-07-01

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in current research by focusing on the “silent majority” of social media users—those rarely vocal yet constituting the bulk of audiences—and their actual comprehension of ethos (credibility appeals) and pathos (emotional appeals) in online discourse. The authors construct a novel paired dataset comprising original posts and human-written reader interpretations, then employ manual annotation, semantic comparison, and predictive modeling to empirically examine how rhetorical elements are retained or transformed in audience understanding. Findings reveal that approximately 30% of interpretations diverge from the original intent, that rhetorical content elicits greater interpretive variability than neutral content, and that ethos and pathos in the source text significantly predict readers’ implicit perceptions of authorial stance. This work thus uncovers cognitive discrepancies and influence mechanisms underlying classical rhetorical strategies in digital communication.

Abstract

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.

Problem

• ethos
• pathos
• silent audience
• rhetorical appeals
• social media interpretation

Innovation

• ethos
• pathos
• silent audience
• rhetorical appeals
• interpretation divergence