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Temporal Dimensions of Conversational Interaction

The Role of Response Latencies and Pauses in Social Impression Formation

Haverford College, mboltz{at}haverford.edu

Four experiments examined whether variations in response latencies to a speaker’s query can be used to infer certain characteristics of a respondent. Across all experiments, participants listened to a set of monologues that varied in their underlying speech act (honesty, confidence, certainty, compliance). In Experiment 1, participants were asked to produce a designated one-word response to each monologue with the latency that conveyed either the most favorable or unfavorable impression. Experiment 2 relied on a perceptual rating task and confirmed that those latencies produced to express the most positive and negative impressions were in fact perceived as such by an independent group of participants. More important, the acceptance range of response latency behavior varied with different speech acts and evaluative dimensions. Experiments 3 and 4 extended these findings by revealing that the duration of inter-sentence pauses of a speaker’s monologue appears to be the primary determinant of response timing behavior. As a set, these results suggest that people adopt different criteria when judging different types of potential deception and this in turn can be facilitated by processes related to speaker accommodation.

Key Words: response latency • social impression formation • timing behavior • deception

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