一聲問候定乾坤

2015-04-29 00:00:00ByMichelleTrudeau

瘋狂英語·原聲版 2015年11期

You Had Me at Hello

Remember that famous line from the movie 1）Jerry Maguire， where Renée Zellweger says to Tom Cruise...

（Soundbite from Jerry Maguire）

Renée Zellweger：（as Dorothy Boyd） You had me at hello. You had me at hello.

Turns out there’s some scientific evidence backing this up， according to psychologist Phil McAleer at the University of Glasgow， Scotland.

Phil McAleer： From that first word you hear a person speak...

Voice： Hello.

Phil： ....you start to form this impression of the person’s personality.

To explore this， McAleer recorded 64 people—men and women from Glasgow—reading a paragraph in which the word “hello” occurred. He then 2）extracted all the hellos， got over 300 3）participants to listen to the different hellos and to rate them...

Phil： On one of 10 different personality traits.

Such as 4）trustworthiness， 5）aggressiveness...

Phil： …confidence， 6）dominance， warmth.

Basically， asking each participant...

Phil： What is your first impression of a person from the moment you hear them speak？

Here are a couple of examples of what the participants listened to and rated.

Man A： Hello.

Phil： That voice， for our participants， was rated the most trustworthy male voice in the study.

Versus this voice.

Man B： Hello.

This speaker was rated the most untrustworthy male.

Phil： The sort of guy you’d want to avoid， or you wouldn’t really want to talk to on the phone. In the 7）pitch of the two voices， the trustworthy male says “hello” really quite high-pitched， like， “hello.”Whereas， the untrustworthy guy kind of says it in more of a， like， “hello.”

Likewise for the female voices.

Woman A： Hello.

That female voice was rated the most dominant personality.

Phil： So the dominant female， you can hear in her voice—again， it sounds like the pitch is lower. So it sounds like she’s speaking in a bit more of a deeper voice.

Compared with the voice of the woman who was rated the least dominant.

Woman B： Hello.

Phil： In the non-dominant female that you just played there， it doesn’t have that strength in the voice anymore.

Now， McAleer says it doesn’t really matter whether the ratings of personality accurately reflect a speaker’s true personality. What matters， he 8）contends， is that most participants rated the voices the same way.

Phil： So we’ve asked 300 different people who don’t know each other to rate 64 voices that they’ve never heard before. And from that， what we find is that they all seem to perceive that that voice is the most trustworthy， and another voice is the least trustworthy.

And for the other personality traits—such as dominance， warmth， confidence...

Phil： They rate in a very similar fashion as well.

In less than a second， we make a snap judgment about somebody’s personality， says Jody Kreiman， a UCLA researcher who studies how we perceive different voices. Hearing just a brief 9）utterance， we decide whether to approach the person or to avoid them. Such rapid 10）appraisals， she adds， have a long 11）evolutionary history. It’s a brain process found in all 12）mammals.

Jody Kreiman： So， you know， biological things， things that are important for behavior and for survival， tend to happen pretty fast. You don’t have a huge amount of time. It has to be a simple system of communication.

And it doesn’t get much simpler than a simple hello， rapidly communicating friend or foe； a phenomenon that Phil McAleer has now dubbed the Jerry Maguire Effect—13）underscoring the old 14）adage： You never get a second chance to make a first impression.