The Sound of Your Voice Can Make You Smarter When Promoting Ideas.

You might think it will be easier to demonstrate your intelligence through writing, but research shows that the sound of your voice actually makes you smarter and your ideas stronger.

A series of experiments by Juliana Scroeder, assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Nicholas Epley, professor of behavioral sciences at the University of Chicago, show that verbal communication has some distinct advantages over writing when you want to appear competent. , thoughtful and intelligent. Scroeder and Epley explain in the Harvard Business Review :

… that the written passages lack critical paralinguistic cues that provide important information about the intelligence and thoughtfulness of the speaker … Without even thinking about it, you naturally flood the listener with clues about your thinking through subtle changes in pitch, tempo, volume and pitch … A listener tuned in to these modulations naturally decodes these signals … Written text may not produce the same impression as your voice, because it lacks an important feature: the sound of intelligence.

Putting your ideas down in writing may give you time to carefully craft the ideal statement with a few changes, but your voice is already designed to propel others into your complex thought process. The next time you have a good idea, you can skip the email and share it in person. You probably still want to collect your thoughts ahead of time, but at least you can approach knowing that your voice will do some of the work for you. The entire article is worth reading, so find out more about Scroeder’s and Epley’s experiments at the link below.

Science sound smart | Harvard Business Review

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