Showing disinterest. A persuasive strategy to win the electors’ trust

The persuasive political discourses of two politicians, Ségolène Royal and Romano Prodi, are analysed according to a model of persuasion in terms of hierarchy of goals. Then the paper focuses on the persuasive strategy of “showing disinterest”: since in persuasion the Persuader proposes to pursue a goal by arguing that it is in the Persuadee’s interest, a subgoal of this may be to argue that the goal proposed is not in the interest of the Persuader. The verbal and multimodal body behaviour of the two politicians are illustrated to highlight their use of this strategy, and some implications of the whole approach are overviewed for the construction of Persuasive Agents.