The Pin Drop Principle: Captivate, Influence, and Communicate Better Using the Time-Tested Methods of Professional Performers by David Lewis & G. Riley Mills

Author:David Lewis & G. Riley Mills [Lewis, David]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-04-30T14:00:00+00:00

In general, listeners of both genders find the female voice more pleasing than the male voice. Research suggests that this preference starts as early as the womb for many people. According to Stanford University professor Clifford Nass, author of The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, this is the reason most navigation systems and recorded voices are female. “It's much easier to find a female voice that everyone likes than a male voice that everyone likes,” says Nass. “It's a well-established phenomenon that the human brain is developed to like female voices.”4

Another study that demonstrated the importance of paralanguage in a person's communication, done by psychologist Nalini Ambady and medical researcher Wendy Levinson, was detailed in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.5 In the study, which involved insurance companies and medical malpractice lawsuits, Ambady and Levinson set out to discover whether they could correctly predict which doctors were more likely to be sued by their patients. Levinson began by recording hundreds of conversations that took place between a series of doctors and patients. While half of the doctors in the study had never been sued, the other half had been sued at least twice. Ambady then listened to the recorded conversations. For each doctor, she chose two conversations with patients and then extracted two ten-second clips of the doctors speaking from each of these conversations.

What she discovered next goes right to the power of vocal dynamics. Ambady “content-filtered” the recording snippets, taking out all identifiable words and leaving only the vocal dynamics of pitch, inflection, resonance, and pace. By doing this, she was basically removing the content of what the doctors were saying and focusing only on how they were saying it. Ambady was stunned to discover that simply by analyzing those garbled slices of a doctor's vocal landscapes, she could accurately predict which doctors had been sued by their patients and which ones had not. The doctors whose vocal dynamics were judged to sound more dominant tended to be in the sued group while the voices that sounded less dominant and more concerned tended to be in the non-sued group.

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