Rhetorical Analysis Of Immune To Reality By Daniel Gilbert

Daniel Gilbert a well-known researcher in psychological happiness, a field that has incited the attention of well refined and high-profile psychologist and researchers, as well as a lot of interested students. In the article “Immune to Reality” written by profound psychologist Daniel Gilbert, he makes a strong argument about why human beings are wrongly predicting what will make them happy. In attempt to predict what the future holds for a person; this process will rarely include future rationalizations. Looking forward often produces a different result than looking back on the same experience. The mind's ability to adjust to certain circumstances will make a person appear happier to the ones around. The mind will convince the brain that everything …show more content…
Subsequently, he relates the excerpt to he wrote in the beginning of the article to his main idea of the entire article. This is effective because it shows the reader that Gilbert is intelligent and well educated on the subject so he can be trusted to relay the information to the audience. Gilbert uses ethos in his article to communicate his main idea with the reader. An ethos appeal is a type of argumentative appeal that targets a reader’s ethical side. Gilbert continuously uses his expert status to conduct experiments on a few volunteers. He shares the results of his experiments to support his claims stated in the beginning of the article. In an ethos form of writing, the writer provides extensive research and explains the results of the research in terms that will relate to topic of the article. For example, Gilbert ran a study on a group of volunteers who believed they were applying for a job that was nothing more than tasting ice cream and making up funny names for it. The study was conducted to find out how people would feel after being rejected for a job. There were two groups in the experiment. A group that thought they were being evaluated by a judge and that the judge would be the one who decides if they get the job. There is also a group that believed they were being evaluated by a jury of people. People in the jury group were told that if one juror votes for them they would get the job. It group was asked to predict how happy they would feel if they were rejected by their evaluator. Prior to being told whether they were accepted for the job or not, they both predicted to be equally upset if they were rejected. But after being told they were rejected for the position volunteers were happier when they were rejected by a capricious judge rather than by a unanimous jury. This is an ethos appeal because it is an example of research