Coordinator: Michal Korenar
Persuasive communication plays a pivotal role in shaping our beliefs, decisions, and behaviors, for example, when promoting healthier lifestyle choices. While the rhetorical tradition provides numerous tools for analyzing, evaluating, and producing persuasive discourse, a significant knowledge gap remains in understanding how persuasive messages affect diverse individuals and the neural mechanisms underlying these effects. How do people process messages of different designs and within different interactional structures? And how do individual differences affect the reception and effectiveness of various rhetorical strategies?
The research line on neuropersuasion seeks to bridge this gap by testing the cognitive adequacy of rhetorical insights regarding the design of persuasive discourse. In particular, it employs cutting-edge neuroimaging methods (MRI and EEG), alongside behavioral measures such as self-paced reading and eye tracking, to tackle the following questions:
- How do persuasive messages modulate brain activity, and which specific brain regions are engaged during the processing of various persuasive argument types?
- Are there consistent neural patterns that reliably correspond to the persuasiveness of messages of a specific design?
- Which rhetorical strategies, as theoretically identified, demonstrate the highest efficacy in achieving persuasion?
- How do individual differences affect the neural and behavioral responses to persuasive messages and the overall success of various rhetorical strategies?
By answering these questions, we will gain insights into people’s immediate and, in part, unconscious responses to information. We are particularly interested in the role of linguistic properties of arguments and other rhetorical stratagems, such as the semantics and valency of words used, specific discourse markers, grammatical properties of sentences (e.g., voice, aspect, and evidentiality), and manipulations thereof, in determining ease or difficulty of processing. More info: listen to the podcast about neuropersuasion.
Student projects
Supervised by Monique Flecken, Michal Korenar, Menno Reijven, and Jean Wagemans
Barbora Kolcunová and Sylvan Whitmore conducted a research internship, designing in-scanner items for a study investigating whether health-promoting persuasive statements resonate more with bilinguals when presented in their L1 (Czech) or L2 (English).
Emily Duckett examines how people assess expert sources in arguments that rely on expert opinion. Are they more likely to rate an argument as highly persuasive when the claim is supported by an expert they have rated as highly trustworthy, even if the topic is outside the expert’s area of expertise?
Roosmarijn Rentier analyzes the variations in the impact of the belief bias effect on participants evaluating invalid arguments. She does this by testing the acceptability of several invalid arguments that use an acceptable statement of fact or statement of value as their conclusion.
Erynn Young is studying how racist presumptions appear in argumentative discourse on Instagram. She employs membership categorization analysis to reconstruct implicit premises, revealing which predicates and actions are associated with different implicit and explicit racial categories.
Ermioni Seremata is conducting empirical research on the interaction between the logical and pragmatic validity of arguments. Participants are asked to rate the acceptability of logically and pragmatically valid and invalid arguments.
Nora de Haas examines the effect of non-native English accents on the willingness to perform requests. Participants rate how likely they are to perform requests pronounced in different accents and formulated using positive and negative politeness strategies.
Anna Mihlic studies the effect of “mansplaining” on speaker perception, understanding the concept as providing superfluous arguments for something already accepted by the hearer. Participants are asked to rate the “mansplainer” on likeability and masculinity / femininity.
Activities and publications
Conference Talk – J. Hornikx & J.H.M. Wagemans (2025). Does argument quality matter for claim acceptance depending on people’s prior belief in the claim? 5th European Conference on Argumentation – ECA 2025: Argumentation in the Digital Society. Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw. September 25, 2025.
Conference Talk – B. Kolcunova, M. Flecken, J.H.M. Wagemans & M. Korenar (2025). Persuasion, language, and emotional valence: A study on Czech–Slovak receptive bilinguals’ perception of argumentative health messages. 5th European Conference on Argumentation – ECA 2025: Argumentation in the Digital Society. Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw. September 24, 2025.
Conference Talk – Milhic, A., Flecken, M., & Wagemans, J.H.M. (2024). Preaching to the converted: An empirical study into argumentative mansplaining. 4th Argumentation and Language (ARGAGE) Conference. University of Fribourg, June 27, 2024.
Conference Talk – E. Seremeta, M.H. Reijven, M.E.P. Flecken & J.H.M. Wagemans (2023). Managing expectations: The effect of logical and pragmatic validity on argument processing. ISSA 2023 Conference. Leiden University, July 6, 2023.
Seminar Talk – M. Flecken (2023). The psycholinguistics of communication. LANCAR Seminar. University of Amsterdam, March 10, 2023.
Journal Article – Reijven, M. H., Durrani, A., & Dori-Hacohen, G. (2023). “And All of That”: The Long List in Political Discourse, Contrastive Pragmatics (published online ahead of print 2023).
Conference Talk – A. Mihlic, M.E.P. Flecken & J.H.M. Wagemans (2023). Teaching your grandma to suck eggs: An empirical study into argumentative mansplaining. Eight International Conference on Philosophy of Language and Linguistics (PhiLang 2023). University of Łódź, Poland. May 13, 2023.
Journal Article – Kamenetski, A., Lai, V. T., & Flecken, M. (2022). Minding the manner: attention to motion events in Turkish–Dutch early bilinguals. Language and Cognition, 14(3), 456-478.
Journal Article – Misersky, J., Peeters, D., & Flecken, M. (2022). The Potential of Immersive Virtual Reality for the Study of Event Perception. Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 3, [697934].
LANCAR 