SYSK TRENDING - What Makes Someone Credible

Something You Should Know

This episode of 'Something You Should Know' explores the science behind credibility and why we believe certain people over others, even when

Key takeaways

• Credibility is influenced more by subtle signals like appearance, status, and perceived warmth than by the factual accuracy of a message.
• People make instant judgments about credibility within milliseconds based on messenger traits.

Main topics

• The psychology of credibility
• Hard vs. soft messenger traits

Notable quotes

"Increasingly looking and sounding right is often more important than actually being right."

Conclusion

Credibility is less about the message and more about the messenger's p

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) Why do you believe some people almost instantly, while others make you skeptical, even when they seem to know what they're talking about? We like to think credibility comes from expertise, experience, and having the facts on your side. And those things certainly matter. But it turns out there are other, less obvious signals that determine whether people trust you and believe what you say. And some of the things we do to make ourselves sound more credible can actually have the opposite effect. Understanding how credibility works is especially important today when we're constantly trying to figure out who and what to believe. And that's why today's SYSK Trending topic is, What Makes Someone Credible? And how can you be more credible yourself? Stephen Martin has studied the science of influence and persuasion, and he's going to explain what the research reveals about earning people's trust. And we'll get to that right after this. Speaker 1 (1:03) Have you ever wondered why you're more likely to believe some people and less likely to believe others? What is it that makes some people more credible or appealing or likable? This is such a fascinating topic because we like to believe, or I like to believe, that I'm a good judge of character, that I can tell when someone is believable and trustworthy and worth listening to. But there's a lot going on under the surface. Stephen Martin has been studying this for quite a while. He's a researcher, a visiting professor of behavioral science at Columbia University, and he's the author of a new book on the topic called Messengers, Who We Listen To, Who We Don't, and Why. Hey, Stephen, welcome to Something You Should Know. Speaker 2 (1:50) Well, thank you, Mike. It's good to join you. Speaker 1 (1:52) I love this topic because I have long thought that there's something to this whole idea of Why we listen to who we listen to and how did how did you get interested in this? Speaker 2 (2:04) I've been working in the behavioral sciences and persuasion sciences for a number of years and So and we often kind of get together our organization in a little lunchtime meetings and we talk about Situations that occur in everyday life that just don't seem to make sense, you know, so one of them is this Situation I think that many of us will have faced where you have an idea And you go tell someone about that idea, maybe a colleague at work or a friend or a neighbor. And they look at you in that strange way as if you're talking crazy. And then you find out a couple of days later that someone else has come along with the exact same idea that you've had. And those same people are now enthusiastically embracing it. And we kind of thought, well, that's interesting, isn't it? That someone can say something and it'd be dismissed. Someone else can come along and say the exact same thing. and it be accepted. It can't be the content of the message. We're often told that in order to get our message heard, in order for someone to believe us, we need a good case to make. But what we're finding increasingly, I think, in society is who delivers the message is sometimes as important, and actually in certain cases, Mike, even more important than the... the merits of what's actually being said. And that intrigued me. And so we started looking at it a couple of years ago and unearthed this trove of research. Speaker 1 (3:31) And if you had to boil down that trove of research into a couple of sentences or a generalization, what is it? Speaker 2 (3:39) I think the generalization would be increasingly looking and sounding right is often more important than actually being right. Well, Speaker 1 (3:46) and I think we all sort of know that on a fundamental level of, you know, if someone were to tell you something and they're dressed in rags and their speech isn't particularly good, isn't going to... hold much water with you, versus if a guy in a beautiful suit and, you know, was very articulate said the same thing. I mean, we all have a sense that that guy's going to be much more persuasive than the other guy, but it's more than that, right? Speaker 2 (4:13) Well, it is. And that's a really neat example. You know, when you say those words, we have a sense. That's what a lot of the research that we've uncovered and studies of our own have actually found, that some of the inferences that we're making in deciding who we should listen to and who we shouldn't are occurring within milliseconds. You know, there's a feature or a characteristic of a messenger that just seems to connect with us in some way. And we almost instantaneously start to believe and want to listen to what they have to say. Again, regardless of its truth or wisdom. So that, have a sense that you've just used, that terminology is exactly right. Speaker 1 (4:57) And is it subjective or objective? In other words, do I have my own criteria for who I'm more likely to believe, or are there objective criteria that make someone believable to everyone? Speaker 2 (5:10) Well, essentially what our research finds is that there are certain... innate characteristics that a messenger is able to signal to an audience that immediately puts them in a position where they're more likely to be listened to. And those innate characteristics are largely divided into two groups. There are society's hard messengers, and they're the messengers that typically an audience would see as having some sort of status over them. And as a result of that elevated status, they're more inclined to be listened to. And there are messengers, in contrast, that are softer. They have a connectedness with their audience. And it seems to me