27.06.2024

SCIENTIFICLY PROVEN: YOU HAVE A BIG INFLUENCE BY SPEAKING IN A LOWER VOICE

Scientific research has confirmed that you can influence your interlocutors much more strongly if you lower your voice in the first minutes of communication.

People tend to associate this way of speaking with more prestige, says Dr. Joey Chen. She and her colleagues focused in this study on the influence of the voice on the transmission of status. In other words, what impression do people make about themselves and how does this affect the behavior of others.

After a series of experiments, it turns out that by speaking quietly, with a lower and denser voice, they achieve both an effect of prestige and dominance. In the first case, they gain respect. In the second case, it is also mixed with a certain amount of awe.

In one of the experiments, the participants were gathered live and had to complete a group task. The scientists found that those who lowered their voices at the beginning gave the impression of dominance to others. The others were more willing to listen to them, comply and carry out what they asked and suggested for the completion of the task.

In another experiment, participants listened to audio recordings without seeing the speakers and had to make judgments about them. "We found that when the voice on the recording was lowered, people judged the person as more authoritative and stronger," commented Dr. Chen.

"Our study adds to the evidence that humans, like many other animals, use their voices to signal and assert dominance over others. Furthermore, no matter what groups we observed—with what culture and in what context, when communicating, people inevitably split into leaders and followers and a kind of hierarchy is formed," summarizes the head of the study.

This study focuses on the first minutes of communication, in which strangers form their first impressions of each other. But other research shows that when you talk to your boss, colleagues or familiar partners, the same mechanisms are at work. A quiet and deep voice instills respect and dominance in them, they begin to listen to you and you have a better chance of achieving what you want.

The shouts, the high and shrill voice reveal a nervous, aggressive, ill-mannered person who is not confident in himself, cannot control himself and when communicating, he compensates by using his behavior to intimidate and impose himself by force.

The result is that the natural defensive reaction of his interlocutors is triggered and they become less inclined to cooperate with him. They don't even want to listen to him because he annoys and worries them with his way of speaking.