Psychological Audience Analysis 

Coaches figured out the “X factor” when they began asking the best QBs how they made their decisions during a play. Although the QBs did in fact make countless calculations and decisions during a play, instead of talking about those decisions, the QBs wanted to talk about their feelings. When QBs described a play, many of them talked about anxious feelings when they looked one way and happy feelings when they looked another — usually right before they threw a successful pass. The interesting point is that the QBs’ feelings tended to line up with the reality on the field — anxious when a receiver was covered, happy when a receiver was open. The decision that led to a completed pass may have been based on the QB’s feelings, but it was still linked to logical analysis, even if that analysis happened unconsciously.

Your job as a public speaker is, in some sense, to deliver a good “speech pass,” based on your anticipation of the audience’s emotional response. From a psychological standpoint, audience analysis becomes psychological audience analysis — an anticipation of audience feelings and an attempt to marshal those feelings in order to change beliefs, attitudes, values, or behavior.

Understanding the demographic characteristics and group affiliations of an audience, as well as the general BAVs they share, can give you a good sense of how the audience will feel about your speech topic. Heck, figuring out who your audience is and what they believe and value should give you a pretty good sense of how they will feel about you and what you’re saying.

Now, let’s say you’ve analyzed your audience and feel confident that you know who they are and what they likely believe and value. What do you do next? Well, that depends on how the audience feels about you, your topic, and the occasion for which you’re speaking — an orientation known as audience disposition . In other words, what you do with this information depends on the disposition and attitudes of the audience. See the handy Audience Disposition chart on page 72 for some dos and don’ts.