Boston
BILL CLINTON has it, Liz Taylor has it, but Dan Quayle definitely does
not. After analysing the vocal patterns of celebrities in television interviews,
sociologists in Ohio claim to have shown scientifically that former
Vice-President Quayle does not command respect. Quayle鈥檚 voice, they say,
reveals his low status.
People reveal their social status in part by verbal cues. In laboratory
experiments, inspired by a theory proposed by Howard Giles, a social scientist
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, people have been found to alter
their accent and speed of response when talking with people they perceive to be
of higher status, in an apparent attempt to ape their speech patterns.
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Stanford Gregory and Stephen Webster of Kent State University have now
extended this work. They analysed the shifts in vocal tone at frequencies below
500 hertz made by a range of celebrities interviewed by Larry King, CNN鈥檚
leading talk show host.
Clinton and George Bush forced King to adjust his bass tones to match theirs.
King also shifted his vocal ground towards Elizabeth Taylor鈥檚. But the writer
Garrison Keillor and film director Spike Lee both adjusted their low-frequency
range to sound more like King. At the bottom of the social heap came Quayle, who
adjusted his tones the most to match those of King.
Gregory, who reports his results in the latest issue of the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, says: 鈥淧eople are like acoustic
chameleons, adapting to their social environment.鈥�
A panel of 600 students who watched the interviews were asked to rank the
participants鈥� status, and they came up with a closely matching league table.
Gregory warns that voice coaching alone is unlikely to stop someone from
revealing that they perceive themselves to be of low status.