Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

Person Perception in Audience Decision Making 277

of facial expressions usually dominate the verbal message.^235 When sentencing a defendant, for

example, mock jurors are more infl uenced by the defendant’s facial expressions of remorse than by

their verbal statements of remorse.^236

Audiences also use verbal cues to infer the emotions of writers, as the story of the following

email reprimand illustrates. Verbal behaviors indicating upset and anger in a CEO’s email to his

managers—profanity, threats, insults, sarcasm, and ultimatums—caused a stir on Wall Street after an

offended manager posted the CEO’s email on one of Yahoo’s online investor message boards. “We

are getting less than 40 hours of work from a large number of our K C-based EMPLOYEES,” the

CEO’s email began.

The parking lot is sparsely used at 8 a.m.; likewise at 5 p.m. As managers—you either do

not know what your EMPLOYEES are doing; or you do not CARE. You have created

expectations on the work effort which allowed this to happen inside Cerner, creating a

very unhealthy environment. In either case, you have a problem and you will fi x it or I will

replace you. NEVER in my career have I allowed a team which worked for me to think they

had a 40-hour job. I have allowed YOU to create a culture which is permitting this. NO

LONGER.

After listing the ways employees would be punished if the company parking lot were not full

between 7:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. and exclaiming that “what you are doing, as managers, with this

company makes me SICK,” the email ended with “You have two weeks. Tick, tock.”^237

Almost immediately after the CEO’s email was posted, the company’s stock price plummeted

22%. A few days later, the CEO apologized to his staff in a follow-up email as well as in an article

in the local newspaper, but his efforts were not enough. The company’s stock hit bottom three

weeks after an article about the email appeared on the front page of the business section of The

New York Times.

Attention to Professionals and Their Behaviors

Compared with objects, human beings capture a disproportionate amount of the audience’s atten-

tion.^238 Professionals attract more attention than other people within the audience’s view when

they are better lit, dressed differently, or walking while others are sitting.^239 A professional also

attracts more attention from audience members when she sits down directly opposite them.^240

In addition, unusual vocal behaviors such as an unusual pitch or a foreign accent can be atten-

tion getting. Audiences detect more typical behaviors in other people only if they attend to them

carefully.^241

When audience members are able to see a person speaking, they devote as much as 96% of their

total viewing time attending to their face.^242 The default location of audience members’ eye fi xa-

tions is the bridge of the speaker’s nose or the eye area.^243 A speaker’s gaze triggers automatic shifts

in the viewer’s visual attention. When a speaker averts her gaze, audience members tend to follow

the direction of her eyes to ensure they are attending to the same object or person, a phenomenon

referred to as joint attention.^244

Since audience members spend 96% of their viewing time looking at the speaker’s face, they

only occasionally fi xate on the speaker’s gestures.^245 In fact, audiences directly fi xate on only 7%

of all arm and hand gestures. However, audience members’ peripheral vision is suffi cient to allow

them to perceive the speaker’s gestures and to make sense of them even while they are fi xating on

the speaker’s face.^246