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October 23, 2019

Talking in class: Studying speech cues’ role in job interviews

By Michael C. Bingham

Job candidates at employment interviews expect to be evaluated on their experience, conduct and ideas. But a new study by Yale researchers suggests that interviewees are also judged based on their social status — sometimes mere seconds after they begin to speak.

The study, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates that people can with a high degree of accuracy assess a stranger’s socioeconomic status — class, income, education, occupation status — based on brief speech patterns. According to the study, these snap perceptions influence hiring managers in ways that favor job applicants from higher social classes.

“Our study shows that even during the briefest interactions, a person’s speech patterns shape the way people perceive them, including assessing their competence and fitness for a job,” said Michael Kraus, assistant professor of organizational behavior at the Yale School of Management, who headed the study.

“While most hiring managers would deny that a job candidate’s social class matters, in reality, the socioeconomic position of an applicant or their parents is being assessed within the first seconds they speak — a circumstance that limits economic mobility and perpetuates inequality.”

The researchers based their findings on five studies. Four examined the extent that listeners assess social class based on just a few seconds of speech. Researchers concluded that reciting as few as seven random words was sufficient to allow people to discern the speaker’s social class with above-chance accuracy. (Some of the words: thought, yellow, beautiful, imagine.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SOM’s Kraus: ‘People tend to rely on class cues without realizing it.’

Researchers also discovered that speech adhering to traditional standards for American English as well as contemporary digital standards — i.e., voices used in tech products like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant — was associated with both actual and perceived higher social status.

Finally, the researchers showed that pronunciation cues in an individual’s speech communicate the speaker’s social status even more accurately than the actual content of the words spoken.

A fifth study examined how these speech cues influence hiring. Hiring managers judged the candidates they perceived to be from higher social classes as more likely to be competent for the job and a better fit for it than the applicants from lower social classes. They also assigned the applicants from higher social classes higher salaries and signing bonuses than “lower-class” candidates. 

“We rarely talk explicitly about social class, and yet, people with hiring experience infer competence and fitness based on socioeconomic position estimated from a few seconds of an applicant’s speech,” Kraus said.

“People tend to rely on class cues without realizing it,” he told NHB. “I don’t hire the lawyer whose dad is a lawyer for the reason that they come from the same place in society. Rather I hire the lawyer with a dad who is a lawyer because he has all the right educational experiences and legal experiences, and he has a family track record of excellence in law.

“What people don’t realize,” Kraus added, “is that all that stuff is about class.”

 

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