Definition
Pathos is the rhetorical appeal that works through emotion: making an audience feel something, whether concern, hope, anger, or sympathy, in service of a persuasive point. Pathos is not automatically manipulative. A specific, real example of who is affected by a policy gives an audience a reason to care about an outcome that a bare statistic does not provide on its own.
Example
Instead of only citing that a policy affects "12,000 families," a debater describes one concrete situation: a specific kind of household that would lose access to a service under current rules. That single vivid example makes the statistic feel real rather than abstract, without changing the underlying facts of the case.
Common mistakes
The most common misuse is leaning on pathos as a substitute for a warrant. A moving example makes an audience want a claim to be true, but it does not on its own establish that the claim is true or that it generalizes beyond the one example given. The strongest debate speeches pair pathos with logos, so the emotional weight and the logical support point at the same conclusion.