It's all about you
Persuasion, Emotion, and Language: The Intent to Persuade Transforms Language via Emotionality
Matthew Rocklage, Derek Rucker & Loran Nordgren
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Persuasion is a foundational topic within psychology, in which researchers have long investigated effective versus ineffective means to change other people’s minds. Yet little is known about how individuals’ communications are shaped by the intent to persuade others. This research examined the possibility that people possess a learned association between emotion and persuasion that spontaneously shifts their language toward more emotional appeals, even when such appeals may be suboptimal. We used a novel quantitative linguistic approach in conjunction with controlled laboratory experiments and real-world data. This work revealed that the intent to persuade other people spontaneously increases the emotionality of individuals’ appeals via the words they use. Furthermore, in a preregistered experiment, the association between emotion and persuasion appeared sufficiently strong that people persisted in the use of more emotional appeals even when such appeals might backfire. Finally, direct evidence was provided for an association in memory between persuasion and emotionality.
To Whom Do We Confide Our Secrets?
Michael Slepian & James Kirby
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although prior work has examined secret keeping, no prior work has examined who gets told secrets. Five studies find compassion and assertiveness predict having secrets confided in oneself (as determined by both self- and peer reports), whereas enthusiasm and politeness were associated with having fewer secrets confided. These results bolster suggestions that interpersonal aspects of personality (which can fit a circumplex structure) are driven by distinct causal forces. While both related to agreeableness, compassion (empathy and desire to help) predicts being confided in more, whereas politeness (concern with social norms and social rules) predicts being confided in less. Likewise, while both related to extraversion, assertiveness (having the agency and drive to help) predicts being confided in more, whereas enthusiasm (positive sociality) predicts being confided in less.
The evil eye: Eye gaze and competitiveness in social decision making
Mauro Giacomantonio et al.
European Journal of Social Psychology, April 2018, Pages 388-396
Abstract:
We demonstrate that a person's eye gaze and his/her competitiveness are closely intertwined in social decision making. In an exploratory examination of this relationship, Study 1 uses field data from a high‐stakes TV game show to demonstrate that the frequency by which contestants gaze at their opponent's eyes predicts their defection in a variant on the prisoner's dilemma. Studies 2 and 3 use experiments to examine the underlying causality and demonstrate that the relationship between gazing and competitive behavior is bi‐directional. In Study 2, fixation on the eyes, compared to the face, increases competitive behavior toward the target in an ultimatum game. In Study 3, we manipulate the framing of a negotiation (cooperative vs. competitive) and use an eye tracker to measure fixation number and time spent fixating on the counterpart's eyes. We find that a competitive negotiation elicits more gazing, which in turn leads to more competitive behavior.
Escalation of competition into conflict in competitive networks of Formula One drivers
Henning Piezunka et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
This article investigates the factors that escalate competition into dangerous conflict. Recent sociological theorizing claims that such escalations are particularly likely in dyads of structurally equivalent people (i.e., actors who have the same relations with the same third parties). Using panel data on Formula One races from 1970 through 2014, we model the probability that two drivers collide on the racetrack (an observable trace of conflict) as a function of their structural equivalence in a dynamic network of competitive relationships. Our main hypothesis, that the likelihood of conflict rises with structural equivalence, receives empirical support. Our findings also show that the positive association between structural equivalence and conflict is neither merely a matter of contention for official position nor an artifact of inherently hostile parties spatially exposed to each other. Our analyses further reveal that this positive association is concentrated in a number of theoretically predictable conditions: among age-similar dyads, among stronger performers, in stable competitive networks, and in safe, rather than dangerous, weather conditions. Implications for future research on conflict, networks, and tournaments are discussed.
Language Style Similarity and Friendship Networks
Balazs Kovacs & Adam Kleinbaum
Yale Working Paper, February 2018
Abstract:
Why do friendship networks form? Social scientists have documented multiple forces that shape social networks, perhaps foremost of which is homophily, the tendency of friends to be similar in myriad ways. This paper demonstrates in two studies that similarity in linguistic style is associated with friendship and that the causal arrow points in both directions: linguistic similarity drives network tie formation and friends exhibit linguistic convergence over time. In the first study, we analyze the linguistic styles and the emerging friendship network in a complete cohort of 285 graduate students at an East Coast university. In the second study, we analyze a large-scale dataset of online reviews from Yelp.com, an online reviewing platform with social network functionality. Across both studies, we collected data in two waves, allowing us to study changes in both friendship networks and linguistic styles over time. Using the LIWC computational linguistic framework, we analyze the full text of students’ essays and of 1.7 million reviews by 159,651 Yelp reviewers. The results consistently show that similarity in linguistic style increases the likelihood that a friendship forms and that friendship ties, in turn, induce a convergence in linguistic style. Finally, we show that these dual engines of homophily - selection and convergence - have profound consequences: in our empirical data and in a simulation study, we show that these processes contribute to network fragmentation and form the basis of structural “echo chambers”.
Repeated imitation makes human vocalizations more word-like
Pierce Edmiston, Marcus Perlman & Gary Lupyan
Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, 14 March 2018
Abstract:
People have long pondered the evolution of language and the origin of words. Here, we investigate how conventional spoken words might emerge from imitations of environmental sounds. Does the repeated imitation of an environmental sound gradually give rise to more word-like forms? In what ways do these forms resemble the original sounds that motivated them (i.e. exhibit iconicity)? Participants played a version of the children's game ‘Telephone’. The first generation of participants imitated recognizable environmental sounds (e.g. glass breaking, water splashing). Subsequent generations imitated the previous generation of imitations for a maximum of eight generations. The results showed that the imitations became more stable and word-like, and later imitations were easier to learn as category labels. At the same time, even after eight generations, both spoken imitations and their written transcriptions could be matched above chance to the category of environmental sound that motivated them. These results show how repeated imitation can create progressively more word-like forms while continuing to retain a resemblance to the original sound that motivated them, and speak to the possible role of human vocal imitation in explaining the origins of at least some spoken words.