You don’t argue your way into a feeling — but a feeling can absolutely argue you into a decision.
Of the classical three pillars of persuasion, emotional appeal is the one research on rhetoric and mass communication keeps finding to be the most reliable lever on actual behaviour — not because emotion overrides reasoning in some crude sense, but because affective response tends to arrive first, shaping how the credibility and logic that follow get received. Fear, anger, hope, and desire don’t just accompany a persuasive message; they’re often what determines whether the rest of it gets a hearing at all.
This is also what makes emotional appeal the pillar most consistently identified as ethically fraught in the study of persuasion: the same mechanism that makes a call to hope genuinely moving can be engineered just as effectively around fear or outrage, independent of whether either is warranted by the facts.
Source: Affect, Emotion, and Rhetorical Persuasion in Mass Communication (2018). Routledge.