Many years ago, friend of mine asked me to help him evaluate a product he was thinking of buying. I dutifully went with him to a sales pitch that was given by a smooth salesman who happened to be from another country. His sales patter was excellent, though you had to really pay attention to what he was saying, because of his accent. When we left the meeting, my friend looked unconvinced. He turned to me and said, "I think his accent made it hard for me to believe what he was saying."
At the time, I wasn't sure what to make of that comment. The more politically correct elements of my psyche were inclined to take offense at the remark. Was that supposed to mean that people from foreign countries are less trustworthy than people with native accents?
My inner psychologist, though, was curious whether the difficulties we have understanding people when they speak with a foreign accent might be translating themselves into a lower level of trust in the person. I filed this question away and forgot about it until I saw a paper by Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar in the October, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. They tackled this question head-on.
In this experiment, the participants were native speakers of English. They heard a number of trivia statements like "A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can." Participants had to rate how likely those statements were to be true on a scale. The trivia statements were read aloud by a number of speakers. Some of them had American accents. Some had foreign accents that were fairly mild and relatively easy to understand. Some had foreign accents that were very difficult to understand.
Participants were told that the experimenter had written all the statements, so even if participants somehow believe that people with foreign accents are less trustworthy than those with American accents, the accent of the speaker still should not affect their judgments for these statements.
One experiment found that people consistently rated the statements spoken by people with foreign accents as less believable than those spoken by people with American accents. This was true both for the statements read with a mild foreign accent and for statements read with a heavy foreign accent.
In a second study, participants were told specifically that the study was focused on whether foreign accents affected the believability of statements. This study was designed to see whether people could correct for the foreign accent when they were thinking about how a foreign accent affected their judgments of truth. In this study, participants rated statements spoken in an American accent or a mild foreign accent as equally true. However, the statements spoken in a heavy foreign accent were still rated as less likely to be true than those of the other groups. So, people could not correct completely for the effects of a foreign accent on their beliefs.
This effect is caused by fluency. As I have written about often in this blog, we use our ease of thinking as a signal about all sorts of aspects of a situation. In this case, we treate fluency as a signal of truth or believability. The more difficult a sentence was to understand, the less likely it seemed true.
What does this mean for you?
First, it means that if you are trying to evaluate something that you are being told by a non-native speaker of English, you have to recognize that the accent may affect your beliefs about the information you are being given. Recognizing that the accent affects your beliefs can help a bit, but may not fix the problem completely. So, if the decision you are making is really important, you should look for other sources of information to help you evaluate a choice. Perhaps you can find some written material that you can read.
If you are not a native speaker of English, and you have to spend some time influencing other people's opinions, then this work suggests that it might be worth spending some time working on your accent. Unfortunately, if your accent makes it hard for people to understand what you are saying, that could be translated into a lack of trust in what you are trying to say.
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