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Methodology

Politics?

  • Survey undergraduate students asking the political affiliation of subjects

  • Survey will test for subject's opinion on the subject matter of the speech to rule out confounding variables

Although powerful and powerless speech has been studied in several different settings, few, if any, studies have been done to see the effect of speech styles on the success of political candidates.

Research Questions:

1. Is a political speech in a campaign for President of the United States more persuasive when it contains powerful speech as opposed to powerless speech?

2. Is there a significant difference in the amount of powerful and powerless speech used in a winning candidate’s speech than in a losing candidate’s speech?

Findings

Speeches

These studies found that there was a significant effect of powerful and powerless speech on impression formation and attitude change, specifically that powerless speech styles result in negative evaluations of a person.

It was also found that there are certain circumstances where the use of powerless speech styles were more desirable because it made the communicator appear to be more "likable."

Subjects will be given two neutral speeches. No author or political party will be evident. They will read the speech and choose who they would vote for and explain why.

(Parton, Siltanen, Hosman & Langenderfer, 2002)

(Bradac & Mulac, 1984)

Other Studies

Content Analysis

Content Analyze speeches of female and male candidates from both political parties to see if there is a significant difference in speech styles of winners and losers

The effects of powerful and powerless speech have been studied in the courtroom setting, classroom, employment interviews, and crisis intervention

The Effect of Powerful and Powerless Speech on the Success of Political Candidates

Sources

Powerful and Powerless speech defined

by Courtney Overton

Smith, V., Siltanen, S., & Hosman, L. (1998). The effects of powerful and powerless speech styles and speaker expertise on impression formation and attitude change. Communication Research Reports, 15(1), 27-35.

Parton, S., Siltanen, S., Hosman, L., & Langenderfer, J. (2002). Employment interview outcomes and speech style effects. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 21(2), 144-161.

Bradac, J., & Mulac, A. (1984). Attributional consequences of powerful and powerless speech styles in a crisis-intervention context. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 3(1), 1-19.

Powerless Speech: characterized by the presences of language features such as hedges (sort of, kind of), hesitations (um, uh), intensifiers (certainly, surely), tag questions (this is great, right?)

Powerful Speech: characterized by the relative absence of these features

(Smith, Siltanen, & Hosman 1998)

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