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Want to convince with your gift of gab? Sales people are hip to the tricks, stating everything as a question and doing more listening than yapping. But a recent study found more subtle ways to persuade.
Scientists had 100 interviewers make calls attempting to convince responders to take a survey. They then analyzed recordings for the interviewers’ speed, pitch and fluency. What emerged were specifics that succeeded in convincing people to take the survey.
Talkers at this speed, “a nice comfy pace,” were much more successful than “a languid pace” and these talkers “boy, I’m really hopped up.” So there's a “just right” speed and it’s about three-and-a-half words per second.
Surprisingly varied pitch made no difference. So “this is really interesting” was just as convincing as “this is really interesting!”
People who pause often are typically seen as awkward but scientists found even big pausers still beat out anyone who was perfectly fluent. So “this’ll…just take…a minute” was always more successful than “this’ll just take a minute.” The research was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. [José Benki et al., "Effects of Speech Rate, Pitch, and Pausing on Survey Participation Decisions"]
—Christie Nicholson
[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
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12 Comments
Add CommentThe podcast was very interesting. Aristotle delineated how to persuade people in his book, "Rhetoric".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Wikipedia article describing this book can be found at the following URL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric_(Aristotle)
So it boils down to speaking like Captain Kirk. :P
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy don't they just ask Washington lobbyists for the financial services industry? The answer: hand out money.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo by studying speed, pitch and fluency we know what to teach people to make them more effective at persuading over the phone. I hope the cause is a good one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisListening to the pod cast its easy to believe that the slightly flawed fluency was more effective than perfect fluency, since the perfect fluency voice gave an impression that the call was designed to be manipulative. A little halting in speech made the speaker seem more real and sincere, less "slick". It's interesting to me that in written language it's the opposite...just a few errors can ruin the message.
Bart Schuster
Arrive2.net
Twitter.com/arrive2_net
Indeed, knowledge about how to persuade people can be put to nefarious use. Or it can be applied, for example, to convince a kid to stay in school. Our coverage of this kind of research can also arm the consumer with knowledge to help keep him or her from being persuaded.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisas a former Salesman with many years face to face experience and also 15yrs of telephone sales (Outbound mostly), I can say with great confidence that the most successful sales people were women that spoke slowly and concisely. The men who spoke like this came in 2nd. Rarely, even as a mortgage / financial sales person speaking clearly, slowly, and again ~ naturally, non - scripted proved to be best.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCapt Kirk was a tad boring so I would suggest to give him 3 large coffees and a valium (20mg) right after, this is the ideal sales and persuasion model. without question!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisah Archimedes! my favorite Ancient Greek. so glad that thing with the romans at syracuse didn't turn out half as bad as we thought (since you're apparently alive and well and posting on internet sites) we still have questions about that mirror thing you made, oh and that weird clock or whatever the heck it was.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
i love your suggestion, regarding Ari's book, being equally a devoted "fan", but while you "plug" his immensely famous "Rhetoric" (sure to get the old fellow some Amazon bucks) you don't give the readers here even a thumbnail sketch of it!
so here goes...and cheers to the good folks at Stanford:
"Aristotle applies numerous concepts and arguments that are also treated in his logical, ethical, and psychological writings. His theory of rhetorical arguments, for example, is only one further application of his general doctrine of the sullogismos, which also forms the basis of dialectic, logic, and his theory of demonstration. Another example is the concept of emotions: though emotions are one of the most important topics in the Aristotelian ethics, he nowhere offers such an illuminating account of single emotions as in the Rhetoric. Finally, it is the Rhetoric, too, that informs us about the cognitive features of language and style"
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/
so there you have it folks, sullogismos (deduction from induction, a type of reasoning) and emotion, and language!
master those: the well-reasoned and the emotionally charged (seem contradictory eh?) couched in effective language and you're on your way to the top
disclaimer: reading Aristotle is more likely to lead you to endless analysis and disputations with your Greek philosophy loving friends and highly unlikely to actually lead to any material rewards whatsoever (Alexander the Great, excepted)
persuasion is nothing more than the ability to be a succesful con. people have been coning each other and studying how to do so long before Pluto. persuasion can be bought and paid for, with meaningful resources applied in intelligent fashion. advertising works. neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists are just begining to learn how, and why.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPersuasiveness is a art not everybody make himself expert in this art.I agree with practice you can achieve some command on this art. Most persuasiveness is manipulation create such illusion person will purchase from you.Speak truth is enemy of persuasiveness
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for the hint !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDoes this research refer to any language? My mother tongue is Portuguese in which the words are longer than in English. Can any of you answer my question?
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