The Book of Tells (Peter Collett)[unlocked]

DOMINANT TELLS
Talk Tells
When people of different status are together, the most
important person usually does most of the talking. This
enables them to remind everyone else of their position. It
also gives them a chance to hear the sound of their own
voice, and to listen to their own opinions rather than those
of other people. Dominant people are quicker off the mark
when it comes to speaking. It's been found that when
groups of people meet for the first time, the order in which
they speak provides a fairly good guide to who will
dominate the proceedings afterwards. The first person to
offer his or her opinion invariably assumes the role of
leader; the last person to make a contribution tends to be
the person who ends up taking orders. 21
Dominant people interrupt others more, and they are
more successful at seeing off people who try to take the
floor from them. They do this by continuing to talk over
the other person, by raising their voice, and by using nonverbal
signals to discourage the other person. As a result,
interruptions initiated by the dominant person tend to
show shorter bouts of overlapping speech than those
initiated by the subordinate person. Dominant people are
more confident in their speech, with the result that they
use fewer hesitations and speech disfluencies like 'urn'
and 'er'. They often make a habit of talking loudly. This is
especially noticeable in Britain, where old class divisions
come into play and members of the upper class sometimes
drown out the conversations of other people.
Dominance is also evident in other aspects of speech.
One of these is what psychologists call 'accommodation'
that is, the tendency of individuals to modify their
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