Cover not available
Part of
Manufacturing Dissent: Manipulation and counter-manipulation in times of crisis
Edited by Cornelia Ilie
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 339] 2024
► pp. 85–118

Chapter 3
Manipulating citizens’ beliefs and emotions

Consensus-seeking and dissensus-generating tactics in crisis management

 | Strömstad Academy
In times of crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, social divisions caused by dissensus about controversial government policies escalate due to widespread uncertainty and anxiety, fuelled by the proliferation of covert and overt manipulative strategies in official discourses. Like citizens in other countries, Swedes received during the Covid-19 crisis scarce or inconsistent information, and potentially misleading messages, while seeking to preserve a trust-based and tradition-rooted national consensus. Using a pragma-rhetorical and argumentation framework of analysis, this study scrutinizes the controversies emerging from the polarization of online comments made by reactive and counter-reactive citizens who either supported or challenged the controversial policies promoted by the Swedish Public Health Agency. The fallacies underlying the commenters’ arguments and counter-arguments show how initially reasonable discussions turned into deeply polarized disputes, as a manifestation of social dissent.
Keywords: manipulation, crisis, crisis, Covid-19 pandemic, cognitive dissonance, health policies, consensus, dissensus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Controversial management of crisis communication
  • 3.Manipulative communication strategies
    • 3.1Discursive strategies of manipulation
      • Statements disguised as questions
      • Overgeneralizations or oversimplifications
      • Emotive or loaded words
    • 3.2Argumentative strategies of manipulation
      • One-sidedness
      • Definitions and re-definitions
  • 4.Analytical approaches and research questions
  • 5.Miscommunication and misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic
  • 6.From consensus to dissensus and back again
  • 7.Cognitive dissonance paradigms
  • 8.To wear or not to wear a face mask
  • 9.“These are the reasons why Swedes should wear masks”
  • 10.Conclusions
    • Compliance with ethical standards
  • References
Published online: 17 January 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.339.03ili
References (74)
References
Aakhus, Mark, and Esther Rumsey. 2010. “Crafting Supportive Communication Online: A Communication Design Analysis of Conflict in an Online Support Group.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 38(1): 65–84. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Åberg, John H. S. 2019. “Is There a State Crisis in Sweden?” Society 56, 23–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Amossy, Ruth. 2010. “The Functions of Polemical Discourse in the Public Sphere.” In Michelle Smith, and Barbara Warnick (eds.). The Responsibilities of Rhetoric, 52–51. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
Andersson, Jan, and Mats Furberg. 1996. Språk och påverkan: Om argumentationens semantik, 8th edition. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Thales.Google Scholar
Aronson, Elliot. 1992. “The Return of the Repressed: Dissonance Theory Makes a Comeback.” Psychological Inquiry 3(4): 303–311. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Asch, Solomon Eliot. 1956. “Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One against a Unanimous Majority.” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied 70(9): 1–70. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barnhill, Anne. 2014. “What Is Manipulation?” In Manipulation: Theory and Practice, edited by Christian Coons, and Michael Weber, 51–72. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baron, Marcia. 2003. “Manipulativeness.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 77(2): 37–54. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berrocal, Martina. 2024. “Maintaining political authority and credibility during the Covid-19 crisis: The case of Czech government press conferences.” In Manufacturing Dissent: Manipulation and counter-manipulation in times of crisis, edited by Cornelia Ilie. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Billig, Michael. 1987. Arguing and Thinking: A rhetorical approach to social psychology. European Monographs in Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
. 1993. “Studying the Thinking Society: Social Representations, Rhetoric and Attitudes.” In Empirical Approaches to Social Representations, edited by Glynis M. Breakwell, and David V. Canter, 39–62. Oxford: Clarendon Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bjørdahl, Kristian, and Benedicte Carlsen (eds.). 2019. Pandemics, Publics and Politics: Staging Responses to Public Health Crises. Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Björklund, Kelly, and Andrew Ewing. 2020. “The Swedish Covid-19 Response Is a Disaster. It Shouldn’t Be a Model for the Rest of the World.” Time, 14 October 2020.Google Scholar
Boczkowski, Pablo J., Eugenia Mitchelstein, and Martín Walter. 2011. “Convergence across Divergence: Understanding the Gap in the Online News Choices of Journalists and Consumers in Western Europe and Latin America.” Communication Research 38(3): 376–396. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Carlson, Greg N. 2011. “The Semantic Composition of English Generic Sentences.” In Properties, Types and Meaning, vol. 2 Semantic Issues, edited by Gennaro Chierchia, Barbara H. Partee, and Raymond Turner, 167–192. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Casagrande, David G. 2004. “Power and the Rhetorical Manipulation of Cognitive Dissonance.” Paper delivered at the Presidential Session of the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. 15–19 December, 2004. Atlanta, GA.
CERC (Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication) Manual. 2014. CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). US Department of Health and Human Services. [URL]
Cohen, A. 1996. Think Generic: The Meaning and Use of Generic Sentences, Ph.D. dissertation, Carnegie Mellon University.
Coleman, Stephen, Nely Konstantinova, and Giles Moss. 2020. The Pandemic and its Publics. How People Receive, Interpret and Act upon Official Guidance. Leeds: University of Leeds.Google Scholar
Coombs, Timothy W., and Sherry Holladay. 2015. “CSR as Crisis Risk: Expanding How We Conceptualize the Relationship.” Corporate Communications: An International Journal 20(2): 144–162. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coons, Christian, and Michael Weber (eds.). 2014. Manipulation: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Crystal, David. 2001. Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Darius, Philipp, and Michael Urquhart. 2021. “Disinformed social movements: A large-scale mapping of conspiracy narratives as online harms during the Covid-19 pandemic.” Online Social Networks and Media 26. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davies, Todd and Seeta Peña Gangadharan (eds.) 2009. Online Deliberation: Design, Research and Practice. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Festinger, Leon. 1957. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Festinger, Leon, and James M. Carlsmith. 1959. “Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance.” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 58(2): 203. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Garber, Marjorie. 2012. Loaded Words. New York: Fordham University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Govier, Trudy. 2007. “Two is a Small Number: False Dichotomies Revisited.” In OSSA Conference Archive 57. [URL]
Gula, Robert J. 2002. Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies. Mount Jackson, VA: Axios Press.Google Scholar
Harmon-Jones, Eddie, and Judson Mills. 2019. “An Introduction to Cognitive Dissonance Theory and an Overview of Current Perspectives on the Theory.” In Cognitive Dissonance: Reexamining a Pivotal Theory in Psychology, edited by Eddie Harmon-Jones, 3–24. American Psychological Association. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ilie, Cornelia. 2009a. “Strategies of Refutation by Definition: A Pragma-rhetorical Approach to Refutations in American Public Speech.” In Pondering on Problems of Argumentation. Twenty Essays on Theoretical Issues, edited by Frans H. Eemeren, and Bart Garssen, 35–51. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2009b. “Ideologically Biased Definitions as Institutionally Legitimating Arguments.” In Perspectives on Language Use and Pragmatics, edited by Alessandro Capone, 116–144. München: Lincom.Google Scholar
. 2015. “Metadiscursive Strategies in Dialogue: Legitimising Confrontational Rhetoric.” In Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society, edited by Alessandro Capone, and Jacob L. Mey, 601–613. Berlin: Springer Verlag.Google Scholar
. 2018. “Pragmatics vs Rhetoric: Political Discourse at the Pragmatics-Rhetoric Interface.” In Pragmatics and Its Interfaces, edited by Cornelia Ilie and Neal Norrick, 85–119. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2021. “Discussion, Dispute or Controversy? Paradigms of Conflict-driven Parliamentary Practices.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 9(2): 237–270. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2022a. “Strategic Questioning.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion, edited by Jeanne D. Fahnestock, and Randy Allen Harris, 165–189. London and New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2022b. “How to Argue with Questions and Answers: Argumentation Strategies in Parliamentary Deliberation.” Languages 7(3), 205: 1–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaspers, Jos M., and Colin Fraser. 1984. “Attitudes and Social Representations.” In Social Representations, edited by Robert M. Farr, and Serge Moscovici, 101–123. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jungkunz, Sebastian. 2021. “Political Polarization during the Covid-19 Pandemic.” Frontiers in Political Science, 4 March 2021. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kampmark, Binoy. 2021. “COVID Meets Volvo: The Swedish Public Health Approach to Coronavirus.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of European Studies 13(1): 85–98. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Dimitra, and Linnaea Stockall. 2013. “Genericity, Exceptions and Domain Restriction: Experimental Evidence from Comparison with Universals.” In Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 17, (ENS Paris – 8–10 September 2012), edited by Emmanuel Chemla, Vincent Homer, and Grégoire Winterstein, 325–343.
Lewinski, Marcin, and Steve Oswald. 2013. “When and How Do We Deal with Straw Men? A Normative and Cognitive Pragmatic Account.” Journal of Pragmatics 59(B): 164–177. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Maillat, Didier, and Steve Oswald. 2024. “Manipulation in Exceptional Times: Exploiting Overwhelming Contextual Parameters for Manipulative Purposes.” In Manufacturing Dissent: Manipulation and counter-manipulation in times of crisis, edited by Cornelia Ilie. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marcoccia, Michel. 2004. “On-line Polylogues: Conversation Structure and Participation Framework in Internet Newsgroups.” Journal of Pragmatics 36: 115–145. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marinho, Cristina, and Michael Billig. 2024. “How Can Governments Be Prevented from Manipulating Statistics about Covid-19? An Example from UK Politics.” In Manufacturing Dissent: Manipulation and counter-manipulation in times of crisis, edited by Cornelia Ilie. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mason, Lilliana. 2015. ““I Disrespectfully Agree”: The Differential Effects of Partisan Sorting on Social and Issue Polarization.” American Journal of Political Science 59, 128–145. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meyer, Michel. 1996. “Rhetoric and the Theory of Argument.” Revue Internationale de Philosophie 50(196): 325–357.Google Scholar
Nettel, Ana Laura, and Georges Roque. 2012. “Persuasive Argumentation versus Manipulation.” Argumentation 26, 55–69. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Niedzielski, Henry. 2017. “Manipulative Techniques in the Language of Propaganda.” In Dialoganalyse V: Referate der 5. Arbeitstagung, Paris 1994, ed.by Etienne Piétri, 477–486. Berlin and Boston: Max Niemeyer Verlag,.Google Scholar
O’Hair, Dan H., and Mary John O’Hair (eds.). 2021. Communicating Science in Times of Crisis: Coronavirus. Wiley Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Orwell, George. 1946. Politics and the English Language. Mount Holyoke College, Department of International Relations.Google Scholar
Pashakhanlou, Arash Heydarian. 2021. “Sweden’s Coronavirus Strategy: The Public Health Agency and the Sites of Controversy.” World Medical & Health Policy, June 3(10): 1–21.Google Scholar
Perelman, Chaïm. 1989. Rhétoriques. Bruxelles: Éditions de l’Université Libre de Bruxelles.Google Scholar
Reboul, Anne. 2021. “Truthfully Misleading: Truth, Informativity, and Manipulation in Linguistic Communication.” Frontiers in Communication 6: 646820. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rivera, Heather. 2019. “Historian’s Fallacy.” In Bad Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Fallacies in Western Philosophy, edited by Robert Arp, Steven Barbone, and Michael Bruce, 163–165. Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rose, Diana, Danielle Efraim, Marie-Claude Gervais, Hélène Joffe, Sandra Jovchelovitch, and Nicola Morant. 1995. “Questioning Consensus in Social Representations Theory.” Papers on Social Representations 4(2): 150–176.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Göran. 2002. “The Crisis of Consensus in Postwar Sweden.” In Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden, edited by Nina Witoszek, and Lars Trägårdh, 170–201. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Sandemose, Aksel. 1933. En flyktning krysser sitt spor (A Fugitive Crosses his Tracks). Oslo: Tiden.Google Scholar
Stanchi, Kathryn M. 2013. “What Cognitive Dissonance Tells Us About Tone in Persuasion.” Journal of Law and Policy 22: 93–134.Google Scholar
Stevenson, Charles. 1944. Ethics and Language. Connecticut: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Stopfner, Maria. 2024. “Spanish Influenza 1918/19: A diachronic and cross-cultural perspective on blame and blame-avoidance in media and politics in times of crisis.” In Manufacturing Dissent: Manipulation and counter-manipulation in times of crisis, edited by Cornelia Ilie. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tomić, Taeda. 2013. “False Dilemma: A Systematic Exposition.” Argumentation 27(4): 347–68. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Trotter, Stephen Richard. 2015. “Breaking the Law of Jante.” Myth and Nation. Special Issue eSharp 23: 1–24.Google Scholar
Tueanrat, Ying, and Eleftherios Alamanos. 2023. “Cognitive Dissonance Theory: A Review.” In TheoryHub Book: A Theory Resource for Students and Researchers Alike, edited by Savvas Papagiannidis. Newcastle-upon-Tyne.Google Scholar
2006. “Discourse and Manipulation.” Discourse & Society 17(3): 359–383. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Walton, Douglas. 1987. Informal Fallacies: Towards a Theory of Argument Criticisms. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1999. One-sided Arguments: A Dialectical Analysis of Bias. State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
. 2000. Scare Tactics: Arguments that Appeal to Fear and Threats. Dordrecht, Netherlands, and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2005. “How to Evaluate Argumentation Using Schemes, Diagrams, Critical Questions and Dialogues.” Studies in Communication Sciences, Special Issue, 51–74.Google Scholar
Walton, Douglas, and Krabbe, Erik C. W. 1995. Commitment in Dialogue: Basic Concepts of Interpersonal Reasoning. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Walton, Douglas, and Fabrizio Macagno. 2015. “The Importance and Trickiness of Definition Strategies in Legal and Political Argumentation.” Journal of Politics and Law 8(1): 137–148. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wardle, Claire. 2019. “Misinformation Has Created a New World Disorder.” Scientific American 321(3): 88–93.Google Scholar
Witoszek, Nina, and Trägårdh, Lars (eds.). 2002. Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Cited by (5)

Cited by five other publications

Breeze, Ruth
2024. Chapter 9. Lessons learned?. In Manufacturing Dissent [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 339], ► pp. 284 ff. DOI logo
Ilie, Cornelia
2024. Crisis manipulation. In Manufacturing Dissent [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 339], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Macagno, Fabrizio & Ana Carolina Trevisan
2024. Chapter 8. Strategic communication in the Covid-19 pandemic. In Manufacturing Dissent [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 339], ► pp. 240 ff. DOI logo
Maillat, Didier & Steve Oswald
2024. Chapter 2. Manipulation in exceptional times. In Manufacturing Dissent [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 339], ► pp. 62 ff. DOI logo
Marinho, Cristina & Michael Billig
2024. Chapter 6. How can governments be prevented from manipulating statistics about Covid-19?. In Manufacturing Dissent [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 339], ► pp. 186 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.