Do you have an accent? Many of us do even if we don’t think so.
I remember the first time someone told me I had an accent. I didn’t believe them. I obviously *don’t* have an accent! This person was so well travelled that they even guessed where I was from which made me pause a bit. Maybe I did have an accent. I’m not talking a ‘foreign accent’ either. Just a regional USA one.
Which makes this new research out of University of Chicago so interesting. They’ve found if your accent is hard to understand, you’re seen as less truthful & less credible. The harder you are to understand, the worse the problem.
The article focuses on foreign accents but it sounds like people with regional accents would have the same issues. The listener has difficulty understanding the person & turns that difficulty into not trusting what is being said.
I haven’t tracked down the article but would be interesting to see what backgrounds the listeners had – have they worked overseas? travelled? did they grow up somewhere with regional accents? do they think they have an accent?
published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology