ABSTRACT
Posing rhetorical questions—questions that the audience is not expected to answer or for which only one answer can be made—has been advocated as a technique of persuasion for several millennia. Indeed, in The Art of Rhetoric (circa 330 B.C.; trans. 1926), Aristotle addressed the utility of using rhetorical questions in the conclusion of a speech to challenge the validity of an opponent’s arguments. Aristotle’s advice concerning rhetorical questions appears literally in the last paragraph. Interestingly, social scientists have paid about as much attention to the persuasive impact of rhetorical questions as Aristotle did. Zillmann’s (1972) is the first published experimental study of the persuasiveness of rhetorical questions. Since Zillmann’s original publication, only a handful of experiments have been published on the persuasive impact of rhetorical questions.
