Science says you can't win an argument over email - and there's a better way to convince your coworkers

 

Press Release

• Communicating via text - whether email or social media - makes us more likely to dehumanize the people we disagree with.
• A study found that hearing the voice of the person you disagree with helps foster respect, even for a different opinion.
• The power of voice extends into the work place and job applications.
• If you need to discuss something with a colleague, you will be more persuasive in person than over email.

Study Published

The Humanizing Voice: Speech Reveals, and Text Conceals, a More Thoughtful Mind in the Midst of Disagreement

Juliana Schroeder, Michael Kardas, Nicholas Epley

Abstract

A person’s speech communicates his or her thoughts and feelings. We predicted that beyond conveying the contents of a person’s mind, a person’s speech also conveys mental capacity, such that hearing a person explain his or her beliefs makes the person seem more mentally capable—and therefore seem to possess more uniquely human mental traits—than reading the same content. We expected this effect to emerge when people are perceived as relatively mindless, such as when they disagree with the evaluator’s own beliefs. Three experiments involving polarizing attitudinal issues and political opinions supported these hypotheses. A fourth experiment identified paralinguistic cues in the human voice that convey basic mental capacities. These results suggest that the medium through which people communicate may systematically influence the impressions they form of each other. The tendency to denigrate the minds of the opposition may be tempered by giving them, quite literally, a voice.

Source | http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0956797617713798

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav  

Senior Manager @ Knowledge Repository  

Khaitan & Co 

Blog | http://pralhad-fyilibrarian.blogspot.in/  

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