DO YOU HEAR ME?

What’s the smart way to proceed if you want to convince someone of your opinion? You start to collect all the arguments in favour of or against your view and explain why you came to the view you have. What’s the stupid way to proceed if you want to convince someone of your opinion? You make no arguments but instead raise your voice. Unfortunately, the stupid way works remarkably well.

Alex van Zandt and Jonah Berger ran a serious of experiments to identify what kind of language persuades people of an opinion. A lot of work has been done on the kind of language and rhetoric to use to convince other people. University debating class are essentially all about teaching these tricks. But what van Zandt and Berger were interested in is if increasing the volume, the pitch or the variation in volume and pitch have any impact on how convincing someone is to others.

And honestly, I don’t like their results.

First of all, they found that people who are speaking louder and modulate their voice more are rated by the listener as more persuasive and making the better arguments. However, where things get weird is that in some of the experiments, they asked people to listen to a favourable product reviewer by someone else. Some listeners were shown a disclaimer that the reviewer was sponsored by the manufacturer to provide a review of the product, while other listeners were not shown such a disclaimer. If the review was recorded in a factual or less modulated tone, listeners tended to find the review less compelling and persuasive if it was accompanied by a disclaimer that it was a sponsored review. Listeners simply discounted the sponsored review as biased.

But if the same review was provided in a louder, more modulated tone, the disclaimer that the review was sponsored didn’t matter anymore. Listeners were aware that the review was sponsored, but to them, the more forcefully presented review sounded so authentic that they thought the person may have been sponsored to sell the product, but the voice indicated such a level of authentic conviction of the product that this kind of sponsorship didn’t matter anymore. The emotional reaction to the forceful voice dominated the intellectual realisation that the review was a sponsored attempt to sell stuff.

This rather disappointing but entirely believable result reminded me of the German tradition of “Marktschreier” which is somewhat different from the British town crier. Marktschreier are people selling their wares at green markets. They use their voice to attract customers and sell them stuff they really didn’t want. It is obvious to everyone that these guys put on an act to sell stuff, yet because they are perceived as more authentic than regular sellers, they are more successful in selling their wares. Below is a short video of how these Marktschreier work. You don’t need to understand German to get the point…