Future Babble by Dan Gardner

Author:Dan Gardner [Gardner, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: DUTTON ADULT
Published: 2011-03-17T05:00:00+00:00

THE CONFIDENCE GAME

In much the same way, a strong, enthusiastic, confident speaking style has a power that transcends mere rationality—a power the psychologist Stephen Ceci demonstrated in an ingenious little experiment. For more than twenty years, Ceci had taught the same class in developmental psychology at Cornell University. Sometimes he taught it twice in one year, once in the fall semester and again in the spring semester. Using the same course structure, the same lecture outlines, the same material, it was all perfectly routine. But one year, in the break between fall and spring semesters, Ceci and some other professors attended a workshop taught by a professional media consultant. Each professor was videotaped giving a lecture. The consultant critiqued the performance and suggested changes that would make the delivery more expressive and enthusiastic. “Underscore points with hand gestures,” the consultant might say, or “Vary the pitch of your voice.” The substance of the lectures wasn’t discussed. This was strictly about style.

Ceci sensed an opportunity. He would follow the media consultant’s advice about speaking and gesturing in the next semester but otherwise teach his class exactly as he always had. Then he would compare the student evaluations from the fall and spring semesters. If his ratings were higher in the spring, he would know if the stylistic changes alone had made a difference. And they did. Ceci’s ratings improved across the board. Students judged him to be more organized, more accessible, and more tolerant. They even considered him to be more knowledgeable, with his average score on a five-point scale rising from 3.5 to 4.

Ceci’s experiment clarified things by taking expert status out of the equation, but it still leaves some ambiguity. What exactly was it in his new speaking style that people responded to? Was he more likable? Or was it simply the greater enthusiasm and confidence he projected? That’s not clear. But other research suggests confidence is a critical factor. In one study that examined how one person persuaded another when they disagreed, researchers concluded that “persuasion is a function not of intelligence, prediscussion conviction, position with respect to the issue, manifest ability, or volubility, but of the expression of confidence during the discussion itself.” Very simply: Confidence convinces.

Another group of researchers asked people to tackle various problems—math questions, analogy puzzles, forecasts—and state how confident they were that the answer they came up with was correct. Then they were put in groups and asked to decide collectively what the answer was and how confident they were that their answer was correct. The researchers found the group responses tended to match those of the most confident person in the group, whether that person was actually right or not. In a third study, people were asked to watch the videotaped evidence of an eyewitness to a crime. The researchers varied ten different variables, including the circumstances of the crime, how a police lineup was conducted, and the witness’s confidence in her own judgment—in one version, the witness says she is 80 percent sure she correctly identified the suspect; in another, she says she is 100 percent sure.

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