New research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science provides evidence that the speed at which a person speaks is closely connected to how polite they are trying to be. The findings suggest that people tend to slow down their speech when they want to sound courteous, and they naturally perceive slower speech from others as more formal and polite. These insights offer a deeper understanding of how subtle vocal changes help navigate everyday social interactions.
Human interaction is filled with unspoken rules about how to communicate appropriately. When deciding how to address someone, individuals do not just pick specific vocabulary words. They also change the physical delivery of those words, including their volume, pitch, and speed. These non-verbal aspects of communication provide a rich layer of social information.
A prominent theory of human communication suggests that politeness is used to navigate three main social factors. These factors include the social status of the listener, the level of burden the message places on that listener, and the social distance between the speaker and the listener. Social distance refers to how well the two people know each other, such as the difference between a close friend and a complete stranger.
For example, asking someone for a massive favor represents a heavier burden than asking for a quick moment of their time. This heavier burden typically requires a more polite approach. Similarly, speaking to a supervisor involves a different status dynamic than talking to a peer, which tends to prompt more courteous language.
While past work has explored how pitch and volume relate to politeness, little was known about the specific role of speech speed. Nira Liberman, a professor in the School of Psychological Sciences at Tel Aviv University, and her colleagues suspected that an inherent association exists between slowness and courtesy. Speaking slowly might signal an acknowledgment of another person’s higher status by showing a willingness to invest more physical and mental effort into the conversation.
“Elena Stephan and I have a longstanding project on politeness and its relation to psychological distance,” Liberman said. “We think that people use politeness to signal and create social distance versus social proximity.” Psychological distance describes how far away something feels from our immediate reality, and social distance is just one specific type of this broader concept.
“We also know that social distance is inherently tied to other psychological distances, temporal distance, spatial distance and hypotheticality, as well as to abstractness,” Liberman added. Temporal and spatial distance refer to how far away something is in time or physical location. Hypotheticality describes how real or imagined a scenario feels, while abstractness involves thinking about the big picture rather than concrete details.
“Recently, we found that slow versus fast maps on psychological distance and abstractness,” Liberman explained. “This naturally led to the question of whether politeness would be related to slow vs. fast. Do people use slower speech when they want to be more polite? Do they interpret slower speech as being more polite and faster speech as being more rude?”
To explore these questions, the researchers designed a series of four experiments to see if people implicitly link slower speech with formal courtesy. In the first experiment, the research team recruited 102 Hebrew speaking adults to listen to short audio clips. The spoken messages were entirely in Finnish. Because the participants did not understand Finnish, they had to rely entirely on the sound of the voices rather than the actual meaning of the words.
The scientists used a specialized software program to alter the speed of a single spoken message without changing its pitch. They created paired audio clips where one version was slightly slower than the original and the other was slightly faster. For instance, slow clips were played at 86 to 92 percent of their original speed, while fast clips were played at 112 to 122 percent of their original speed.
Participants listened to a pair of clips and were asked to sort them. They had to drag and drop each audio clip into a box labeled either polite and formal or a box labeled casual and informal. The scientists found that 75 percent of the time, participants categorized the slower audio clips as polite and the faster clips as casual.
This provides evidence that people associate a slower speaking pace with formal courtesy, even when they do not comprehend the language being spoken. The researchers then wanted to know if the intention to be polite actually changes how fast someone plans to speak. They recruited English speaking participants through an online platform called Prolific for the next phase of the research.
In the second experiment, 100 participants read a scenario where they had to approach a stranger to ask for a small favor. Half of the participants were told to imagine speaking politely and formally. The other half were instructed to imagine speaking in a casual and informal manner.
The participants were given a written text containing this request and were asked to read it out loud. After doing so, they were asked a hypothetical question. The researchers asked whether they would speak faster or slower if they had to switch and say the exact same thing in the opposite style.
The findings showed that 80 percent of people intended to speak slower when aiming for politeness and faster when aiming for a casual tone. A follow up study with 94 different participants replicated this exact setup but gave people a third option. Participants could specify that they would not change their pace at all.
Even with this third option, 63 percent of the responses still matched the researchers’ hypothesis. The results show a robust link between intended courtesy and an intended slower speaking speed. However, these first three studies only measured perceptions and self-reported intentions.
The researchers were not initially confident that the experiments would yield significant results. “We were not sure at all that people would use pace of speech to decode politeness,” Liberman told PsyPost. “We therefore started with relatively crude studies, thinking that if we do not get those results we will abort the project.”
“We gradually progressed toward more subtle procedures, including a study in which we ask people to say a fixed text more or less politely and measuring speed of speech,” Liberman continued. “In this latter study we did not mention pace of speech nor made it an explicit dimension in any way.”
For this final experiment, the researchers recruited 73 Hebrew speaking women to capture actual spoken behavior in real time. The scientists chose to include only women because previous research suggests men and women tend to have different natural speaking paces. By focusing on one group, they hoped to keep the baseline measurements as consistent as possible.
Participants were given a specific script asking a stranger to fill out an introductory questionnaire. They were randomly assigned to read the script either politely or casually into a voice recorder. Importantly, the written script was completely identical for both groups.
Any differences in the recording time would be due entirely to the speed of their speech, rather than the addition of extra courteous words like “please” or hesitation markers like “umm.” The researchers measured the exact time elapsed between the first and last sound in each participant’s audio file.
The recordings from the polite group lasted an average of 29.66 seconds. The recordings from the casual group averaged 27.94 seconds. This statistically significant difference suggests that individuals naturally slow down their physical speech production when they are trying to be polite. The effect appears to happen spontaneously, as the study instructions never explicitly mentioned anything about speech speed.
“We use subtle cues to regulate social distance: make people around us feel closer or more distant from us, experience us as feeling warm or cold toward them,” Liberman explained. “Pace of speech is one of those cues. People probably use it unconsciously, and yet this cue seems to be reliably decoded.”
There are a few potential limitations to keep in mind. In the first study, the researchers only tested a few natural speaking speeds. It is possible that if a recording is slowed down too much, the listener might no longer perceive it as polite. Previous research in Japanese has suggested that politeness ratings increase as speech slows down up to a certain point, but then decrease if the speech becomes unnaturally slow.
“A major limitation is that we did not examine the effect across cultures,” Liberman noted. “I am very curious to run some of these studies in a different culture.” Expanding the research to include men and people from a wider variety of age groups and locations would help clarify the universality of the effect.
The scientists hope to examine the exact psychological mechanisms behind this phenomenon in greater detail across the globe. “We want to run a cross cultural study, not with pace of speech but rather to examine the more basic idea, that across all cultures, politeness, as a signal of social distance, would be expressed via distancing in time, distancing in space, increased hypotheticality and more abstraction,” Liberman said. “It is a big claim, as it suggests a cultural-linguistic ‘universal.’”
Liberman also invited outside perspectives to help further the project. “I welcome comments and input about diverse cultures,” she added. Future studies might also explore how these speaking dynamics shift when individuals expect to interact with a close friend, which might make them more inclined to be naturally casual.
The study, “An Association Between Speech Rate and Politeness,” was authored by Ravit Nussinson, Chen Dahbash, Ayelet Hatzek, Elena Stephan, and Nira Liberman.
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.