Cross-Disciplinary Argument Synthesis: Testing Rhetorical Principles Across Scientific and Humanistic Domains

The literature shows interesting tensions between different approaches to persuasion - from the computational complexity analysis by Wojtowicz (2024) to the classical conditioning approaches in tourism websites by Aryanto et al. (2019). But here's what nobody's asking: do the same persuasion principles actually work across fundamentally different domains? This research proposes testing whether rhetorical devices that work in social persuasion (like emotional appeals or authority arguments) have the same effectiveness in scientific contexts, or whether scientific argumentation operates by different rules entirely. We could take identical persuasive structures and test them in both contexts - for example, does the same authority appeal work equally well for convincing someone about climate science versus convincing them to buy a product? This challenges the implicit assumption in most persuasion research that there are universal laws of persuasion, potentially revealing domain-specific persuasion "dialects" that could reshape how we teach argumentation across disciplines.

References:

1. When and Why is Persuasion Hard? A Computational Complexity Result. Zachary Wojtowicz (2024). AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society.
2. Mountain Tourism Destination Website Interface Design Based on Classical Conditioning Theory of Persuasion. R. Aryanto, Andreas Chang, M. H. Widianto (2019). International Conference on Information Management and Technology.