Voice Tone and Persuasion

An experiment was performed to test the hypothesis that the outcome of a vocal nonverbal attempt at persuasion can be affected by the participants' skills in nonverbal communication. Subjects' vocal sending or vocal decoding abilities were pretested. Senders and decoders were agents and recipients, respectively, of social influence in a field experiment in which social influence took the form of the senders' ability to elicit differing degrees of hypothetical willingness on the part of the recipients to serve as participants in psychological research. Senders attempted to do this by varying their vocal nonverbal cues while reading a prepared script. There was a strong effect of recipients' decoding skill on influence such that better decoders complied with the experimental manipulation, and the poorer decoders did the reverse. Sending ability by itself was not related to social influence, but the greatest degree of positive influence occurred in dyads composed of better senders and better decoders. Analysis of ratings of the senders' voices while they engaged in the attempt at persuasion suggested that good and poor decoders might have different affective responses to affectively toned communication.