The Puzzle of Motivation: A Rhetorical Analysis

Katie McCoy
Aug 20, 2022
5 min read

The context to this analysis writing is a TED Talk called "The Puzzle of Motivation" by Dan Pink, a speech given about the surprising truths about what gives us motivation in life.

Daniel Pink and His Use of Rhetorical Devices

Daniel H. Pink is an American author and a graduate of Northwestern University, Yale University, and Yale Law School, where he worked in economics and politics until he became an author. His main goal was to educate people, particularly employees, about the reality behind the behavior of motivation in big companies. By installing ethos, antiphrasis, and dialogism, Pink not only helps to shed light on the model that modern day entrepreneurs follow with their businesses and employees, but also to enlighten his audience with ways that they can apply to their own work lives for improvement in the workplace and their own personal satisfaction.

Rhetorical Device No. 1: Ethos

Throughout his speech, Pink uses ethos in attempts to appeal to his audience, making them see as though his argument aligns with their moral values and ideas. In using ethos, Pink talks about himself and his character, as well as his personal experiences in his career. “Today, against my better judgment, I want to dust off some of my legal skills - I don’t want to tell a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses.” This tactic by Pink worked rather well with his audience, as begins his talk with his time spent as a lawyer and everything he has seen with his career, his specialty being economics. He assures his audience that he knows exactly what is inside the mindset of big companies and employers and how they go about their work with their employees.

Another way that Pink used ethos to appeal to his audience was giving researched data, his and others, to his listeners. For example, Pink spoke about a certain experiment that a psychologist - as well as himself - had performed, called The Candle Problem. Pink presented the data collected at the end of the performed experiment with polls to go along with it. The polls had shown the difference in the performance level and the amount of time a group of individuals took to finish the experiment, one time with no reward for completion, and one time with; with these results, he was able to physically present to his audience his evidence to support his argument.

I noticed that not only did Pink choose to use ethos in his words to his audience, but in his body language as well. Pink’s whole idea of employing ethos into his speech is to gain the trust of his audience that he knows what he is talking about; it is obvious that he wants his audience to be as comfortable with him as possible, and the way that he made that happen was to be comfortable with his audience. Pink acted as though he had a great familiarity with his audience, as if they were friends he had known for a while. In doing this, Pink had also instilled humor and humorous words in a sense in other attempts to appeal to his audience.

Rhetorical Device No. 2: Antiphrasis

To persuade his audience in favor of his argument, Pink had chosen the usage of antiphrasis to connect with his listeners. We are already aware of how Pink wins over his audience by employing ethos - appealing to his audience’s trust and values - but to top that off, Pink had gone a step further in hopes of favoring his listeners by adding his own sense of humor in his words. Adding humor into a rather serious topic - how entrepreneurs are using motivational behavioral tactics to corrupt their employees - is definitely a good part to play to help gain his audience’s favor, I would say. His audience is already fully aware of Pink’s time as a lawyer and his career in law, but Pink then feels the need to make a small joke. “So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this.” He continues on throughout the rest of his speech using “lawyerly humor.” “And here’s the thing. This is not a feeling, okay? I am a lawyer; I don’t believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I’m an American; I don’t believe in philosophy.”

He made more commentary involving businesses to better the chance of his argument being supported by his listeners. “In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is not a tree, management is a television set. Somebody invented it. That doesn’t mean it’s going to last forever, but management is great.” The end of these humorous phrases were followed by laughter and smiles from Pink’s audience, which were one big indication that he had indeed gained their trust and had appealed to their values to win them in favor of the argument he was presenting. By installing humor into his argument, it made for a great relief on the audience’s part, which was a good thing for Pink.

Rhetorical Device No. 3: Dialogism

One other tactic that Pink enforced to support his argument and to persuade his audience is his support as well as the use of small, disjunctive conclusions, also known as dialogism. While giving his speech, Pink chose to throw out little conclusion phrases to sum up his topics. Again, speaking back to the experiment Pink was able to perform, he said, “A decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It’s a nice motivator, right? Question: how much faster did the group solve the problem? Answer: it took them 3 and a half minutes longer with the extra reward.”

Pink had decided once more to include the evidence that he had gathered from the experiment to make those small conclusions to present them to his listeners. To further support his argument, Pink throws out another disjunctive conclusion. “You’ve got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, but it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.” And another one. “These contingent motivators - if you do this, you get that - work in some circumstances. But in most tasks, they either don’t work or, often, they do harm.” By making these statements toward his audience, Pink was able to conclude the central idea for his argument as well as gaining further support for it by making such conclusive statements.

To Sum Everything Up...

Comprehensively speaking, Pink persuades his audience into support of his argument by specifically using the rhetorical strategies ethos, antiphrasis, and dialogism, among others. By interacting with his listeners, sharing his personal experiences, giving evidence-based data and researched facts, by throwing his audience concluding statements throughout the speech, and by topping it all of by adding a spark of humor for the appeal of his audience, Pink was able to create a strong argument about the science behind motivation and how it is used to ultimately corrupt the workplace. By his use of rhetorical devices, Pink had a successful gain of support in the end.

Sources Cited

TED Talk Video, "The Puzzle of Motivation | Dan Pink https://youtu.be/rrkrvAUbU9Y