A Linguistic Understanding of the Psychology of Crypto Messages
This paper examines how crypto messages influence and affect people’s behaviour. Using a multidisciplinary theoretical framework, this paper investigates the application of the Social Influence Theory, Emotional Appeals Theory and Aristotle’s Rhetorical Analysis to explain how the attitudes of users are influenced by crypto messages on Telegram. To achieve this, four crypto messages are purposefully sampled and analysed. Findings reveal that reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity shape and govern the interpretation of crypto messages in addition to credibility, emotion and logic. It also discovered that crypto messages are designed to attract support, patronage and funding through the use of catchy expressions that promise great rewards and investment opportunities that appear realistic through seemingly concise and unambiguous messages. This paper concludes that although messages on the crypto space can be persuasive deploying witty expressions that appear harmless, such messages can have underlying detrimental consequences if consumed and acted upon uncritically.
Keywords: crypto, linguistic, messages, psychology, understanding