Doing One Thing Can Make People Perceive You As More Powerful

Have you ever noticed how much information you can get from someone's voice? Think about the unconscious cues you're receiving from your whiny child or from that great speaker at a recent work convention. Think about the President of the United States.

Are powerful people good speakers, or does good speaking come from a position of power? Scientists now suggest that being in a powerful position can alter your speech patterns—and that other people recognize it, according to a study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"We wanted to look at how people's voices change when they are put in positions of high and low power," says Sei Jin Ko, Ph.D., lead researcher on the study and an adjunct professor at San Diego State University. "And there are systematic changes that we can measure in people's voices when they're in positions of power."

In the study, researchers first recorded 161 college students reading a passage out loud. Next, they assigned students to one of two roles for an ensuing negotiation exercise: "High" rank or "low" rank. Those of a high rank were asked to imagine themselves to be in a powerful situation, such as having high status at work already or having valuable inside information. Those of a low rank were asked to imagine that they held low workplace status or no inside information, among other low-power scenarios.

Each student was then recorded reading a second paragraph out loud, pretending they were starting negotiations with an adversary. Researchers studied the acoustics of both recordings, before and after.

"We found that a simple manipulation of power alters the basic acoustic properties of one's voice," says Adam Galinsky, Ph.D., a study co-author and the Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. "Power increased pitch but decreased pitch variability while increasing loudness variability. Essentially people had more control over their voices with power."

Comparatively, the students who imagined themselves to be low-ranking had a speech pattern of their own. "They were less likely to increase their pitch, they were more sing-song sounding, and less variable in how loud and soft their voices sounded," Ko says.

Even more interestingly, those vocal cues were easily recognizable by others. In a second experiment, college students who didn't know about the first experiment listened to the recordings of the speakers reading the second passage and ranked them as more or less likely to engage in high-power behaviors or high- or low-ranking. Most of the time, they were right.

"Listeners are very much in tune with the sound of the voice, so much so that they can judge pretty well who is in power and who is not, based on the characteristics of the voice," Ko says. "The sound of the voice can be quite powerful."

Want to try it yourself? It's all about using your mind before you speak. "One of the manipulations we did was to really imagine immersing yourself in a situation or thinking about a situation where you felt really powerful," Ko says. "Do that, rather than thinking 'Oh my gosh, I'm really nervous.' Imagine yourself in a position of power.

Kate Ashford, Contributor