When you’re persuading someone to do something, what you say isn’t necessarily as important as how you say it. If you want to sound convincing, it’s all about sounding as natural as possible…or at least learning how to fake it.
That’s the finding of the University of Michigan’s Jose Benki, who studied 1380 total calls made by a hundred interviewers for telephone surveys. He wanted to see which interviewers were most successful at getting respondents to agree with the survey by providing a “yes” answer to the questions.
No, this particular study has nothing to do with the teaser image above. Rather it has more to do with the success of folks on the phone with primary analysis on voice pitch, speed, tone, and delivery.
A person’s natural pitch was also important, at least for males. Benki determined that high-pitched males had more trouble convincing the participants than those with naturally deep voices. On the other hand, there was no apparent difference between how high-pitched and low-pitched female operators did. Another key to success, according to Benki, was the use of pauses:
“When people are speaking, they naturally pause about 4 or 5 times a minute. These pauses might be silent, or filled, but that rate seems to sound the most natural in this context. If interviewers made no pauses at all, they had the lowest success rates getting people to agree to do the survey. We think that’s because they sound too scripted. People who pause too much are seen as disfluent. But it was interesting that even the most disfluent interviewers had higher success rates than those who were perfectly fluent.”
Of course, “fluent” here doesn’t refer to the operator’s ability to speak the language – Benki is referring to the actual flow of speech, and the danger of never pausing while speaking. So then, the real key to convincing others to agree with your position – or to do your bidding, depending on how villainous you are – is to speak deliberately, have a relatively deep voice (if you’re male, at least), and put in plenty of pauses.
See http://ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=8404 for more on this particular study.
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Brian
www.BrianDavidPhillips.net
