Politicians are always seeking rhetorical approaches which will be most persuasive with public. Some persuasion rhetoricians have suggested that the speech that shows a facility with data and mastery of facts, as Kennedy displayed in his debates with Nixon, is a way to show intellectual superiority and persuade listeners to one's point of view. Others suggest that the speech that focuses more on anecdotes and examples of compelling individual case illustrations can be more persuasive, as Reagan did with Carter. Suppose you wish to test which approach may be more persuasive by running an experiment which involves two forms of speech given by Governor Ryan of Illinois when he effectively did away with the death penalty in the state by commuting the sentences of all on death row to serving life without parole. Suppose you have two speeches, one that presents all sorts of data-based arguments on doing away with the death penalty and another which focuses upon specific cases in which innocent individuals had been sentenced to death in Illinois.

a. Design an experiment that addresses the various phases of experimental research, including the type of design you would use and the selection of subjects. Justify your choices.

b. Diagram the design using the appropriate symbols provided by gw in the PowerPoint slides.

c. Assess the internal validity of your experiment.

d. Assess the external validity of your experiment.

Understand that your answers do not require any knowledge of persuasive rhetoric nor of death penalty rhetoric or data. For you, these are just stimuli or treatments; they could be anything and are essentially irrelevant to your answering any of these questions.