CECILE ARCURS
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Americans Are
Fast to Judge
Social Class
Judgments about the way people
talk happen quickly and affect
hiring decisions
The plot of the famous musical My
Fair Lady is based on the idea that
the way we speak determines our
position in society. The main charac-
ter, Eliza Doolittle, becomes the
unwitting target of a bet between
two phonetics scholars, one of whom
(Henry Higgins) brags that he can
convince strangers that Doolittle is
a duchess by training her to speak
like one. In reality, she is the poor
daughter of a dustman who speaks
with a thick Cockney accent. By the
end of the musical, Doolittle is able
to pronounce all of her words like
a member of the British elite, fooling
everyone at an embassy ball about
her true origins.
Based on a new set of scientific
studies, it seems that Higgins may
have been right: people can deter-
mine our social class by the way
we talk. Michael Kraus and his
colleagues at Yale University recently
published a paper in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences
USA entitled “Evidence for the
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