Hoax Tactics

The main tactics people use to persuade others that their hoax is real is ethos, pathos and logos. Ethos gives evidence of credibility, pathos taps into people’s emotions, and logos provides logic behind the hoax. In the piece about Joice Heth, Barnum uses ethos by providing “certificates,” “newspaper articles,” and even dialogue from the character herself to verify her story and her age. Having evidence from multiple people makes the hoax more credible. Barnum provides a backstory that uses logos. The backstory of Joice Heth is relevant to a historical time period that existed, and he uses specific details about her origin, marital relationship and slave work that seems like a logical life that someone would have. Pathos is rarely used in this piece, but Barnum does provide detail about the woman being close to death. The tale of Joice Heth’s hard lifestyle of labor and losing her husband makes us want to believe that she persevered through it to live to be 161 years old. It feeds into our human instinct to want a “happy ending” despite the adversities we face. In order for a hoax to be successful, it has to relate to the human experience. Being 161 is outside of the human experience, but the supporting story behind Joice is logical, which makes people believe that it is true. A successful hoax always has to include a factor that people in the time period don’t know much about. The unawareness of that factor makes people believe that anything is possible and creating a picture for them about that topic makes it believable. A unsuccessful goes outside of the human experience. It includes unrealistic things and doesn’t have logical factors to support it.