We’re often told not to make snap decisions or judge people too soon. But no one has told our brains that.
Studies have shown that people will assess your personality, and even how much they trust you, just from the first word you say to them: “Hello.”
So as much as we may want to keep an open mind when meeting someone new, we all have an instinctive wiring system that makes immediate judgments as part of our self-defense mechanism.
A study published on PLOS online found that 320 participants showed a high level of consistency in their assessments of various male and female voices when they said, “Hello.” Specifically, voices with certain qualities were widely considered more trustworthy, or less trustworthy. The test subjects listened to recordings of 32 men and 32 women saying “hello” and then they documented their reactions to the voices.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0090779
Here’s what researchers found regarding trustworthiness and dominance:
Men who raised their tone, and women who alternated their pitch, when they said “hello” were generally perceived as more trustworthy.
Women who spoke in a higher voice, and men who spoke in a lower voice, when they said “hello” were perceived as more dominant.
This is a valuable data point for business leaders as our goal in developing relationships with teams and clients is to build trust into those relationships. It is good news, then, that the element of trust is determined by a feature of speech which we can control: pitch and glide. We can adapt our style of speaking in such a way that people will have a greater sense of trust in us from the moment we speak.
This dovetails nicely with studies that have also shown the importance of exhibiting competence and warmth in our initial meeting with a client. In the same process of making a snap judgment, people will assess how comfortable they feel with you, and whether you are properly skilled in your field, in the first five minutes you speak with them. What you say and how you say it in that short time can greatly impact the rest of your engagement with the client.
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=41451
Given the brain’s goal to always assess threats and help us survive, whatever we can do early in our sales process or communicating as a leader to lower a person’s sense of fear and risk, whether actual or subliminal, and trust us more, will make us more successful in achieving our business goals with them.
