Reference
Linda Carli
The finding that tentative speech can make a speaker more persuasive rather than less, depending on who is listening, is hers.
Carli played 120 listeners the same persuasive message, varying only whether the speaker was a man or a woman and whether the delivery was tentative or assertive. The tentative women were more influential with the men in the audience and less influential with the women. The same sentences moved opinion in opposite directions according to who heard them.
We cite it for one narrow purpose. It is the cleanest available demonstration that there is no fixed answer to whether hedging costs you, and that advice telling everyone to cut the same words is treating something that depends on the audience as though it did not. The study is from 1990 and its setting is a laboratory one, so it carries the limits of its design. Nothing since has restored the simple version it broke.
Referenced work
- Gender, Language, and Influence (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990) reference
Elsewhere
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