Persuasive Communication - How Audiences Decide. 2nd Edition

284 Understanding Intuitive Decision Making

who are well dressed—suits and ties for men, dress clothes for women—than with the requests of

speakers who are poorly dressed.^317 Speakers who wear more formal and higher-status clothing are

especially effective at gaining compliance from lower-status listeners.^318

Speakers who have a high-status speaking style are also more persuasive.^319 Movie theater audi-

ences are more likely to comply with a request made over the public address system when the

announcer uses a standard speaking style versus a colloquial, lower-status style.^320 Consumers some-

times make purchasing decisions on the basis of a salesperson’s speaking style alone.^321 Audience

attitudes about the status of a speakers’ speaking style also play a role in medical encounters,^322 legal

settings,^323 employment contexts,^324 offers of help,^325 and housing discrimination hearings.^326

Audience evaluations of professionals’ speaking styles are based in part on the social class the

professionals’ linguistic behaviors activate.^327 Sociolinguists have demonstrated the existence of

social class differences for several linguistic variables, including syntax,^328 lexical choice,^329 and

intonation.^330 Sociolinguists have also shown that audiences use such linguistic cues not only to

determine a speaker’s social class^331 but also to determine the validity of their arguments. In a study

of the effects of regional dialects, 250 people from two dialect areas listened to arguments spoken

in the standard dialect and in regional dialects of lesser prestige. The listeners’ perceptions of argu-

ment quality varied directly with the prestige of the speaker’s accent.^332 Moreover, standard English

speakers are evaluated more favorably than nonstandard speakers, even when information about

their social class is held constant.^333

Surprisingly, if listeners are led to believe a professional has high status, they will perceive her

speaking style to be more like the standard style than if they believe she is of lower status.^334 Stan-

dard speech is not intrinsically more appealing than nonstandard speech, however. Listeners cannot

discriminate among unfamiliar foreign speaking styles on the basis of aesthetic criteria. Instead,

listeners’ evaluations of familiar speaking styles refl ect the levels of status and prestige of those who

speak that way.^335

The Confi dence Bias: The Persuasive Appeal of Confi dence

Professionals’ confi dence in their recommendations, regardless of their recommendations’ actual

validity, is one of the primary determinants of audiences’ decisions.^336 Audiences weight the rec-

ommendations of confi dent speakers more heavily and are more confi dent when adopting them.

Confi dent group members have more infl uence on group decisions than group members who are

tentative and uncertain.^337

Linguistic style is one cue audiences use to assess a professional’s confi dence. Audiences are

more persuaded by speakers who express confi dence by speaking in a powerful style than by those

who speak in a style that indicates powerlessness.^338 As we have seen, the frequent use of intensifi ers

(e.g., “really big”), hedges (e.g., “I think”), hesitation forms (e.g., “and, uh”), and questioning into-

nations characterizes the powerless speaking style. Conversely, the speaking styles of powerful and

confi dent individuals rarely display those behaviors. In juror decision making, witnesses who speak

in a confi dent or powerful speech style obtain more favorable jury decisions.^339 In employment

interviews, job candidates who speak in a confi dent or powerful speech style are deemed to be more

employable.^340 When audiences read written transcriptions of spoken messages that were delivered

in a confi dent, powerful speech style, however, the persuasive effects of the powerful speech style

are greatly diminished.^341

Provocative statements are another cue audiences use to assess the confi dence of a professional.

For example, clients perceive consultants who take an extreme position (e.g., asserting that a stock

will double in value in the next month) to be more confi dent than those who take a more moderate

position. Clients also fi nd them to be more persuasive.^342