Abstract
In times of shifting media, communication shifts as well. With these changes, today we observe a fundamental change in trust attribution away from formerly established systems. Institutions and the classic media have been sources of trust for a long time but recipients nowadays would rather trust their family, friends, and even strangers with Rachel Botsman having shaped the term “Distributed Trust” to refer to this phenomenon. If it is no longer institutions people trust in, they trust individuals which bears the danger of arbitrariness as these individuals are not backed and monitored by any institutional tradition, reputation, or control. This becomes even more critical as (social) media paves the way for a tremendous amount of individuals to position themselves quickly and effortlessly on numerous channels 24/7. Whilst being exposed to this kind of sensory overload, people do not only have to consider whom to trust and whom not to multiple times a day, they furthermore have to decide at once. What does it take to assign or deny trust though? This article is concerned with the how exactly trust and communication are intertwined: Is it the voice itself which demands for trust or rather the content? If so, how does that content have to be structured to evoke trust? How is trust transported linguistically? And what role does the listener hold? As the established question is multi-layered, it is crucial to first define trust and the character traits that form it. Hereinafter—and only focusing on spoken language—paraverbal, nonverbal as well as content-related features leading to a development of trust on the listener’s side are compiled and described to answer the question “How can communication be utilized to build trust?”.
1 Introduction
In times of shifting media, communication shifts as well. With these changes, today we observe a fundamental change in trust attribution away from formerly established systems. Institutions and the classic media have been sources of trust for a long time but recipients nowadays would rather trust their family, friends, and even strangers with Rachel Botsman having shaped the term “Distributed Trust” to refer to this phenomenon (Botsman 2018). If it is no longer institutions people trust in, they trust individuals which bears the danger of arbitrariness as these individuals are not backed and monitored by any institutional tradition, reputation, or control. This becomes even more critical as (social) media paves the way for a tremendous amount of individuals to position themselves quickly and effortlessly on numerous channels 24/7. Whilst being exposed to this kind of sensory overload, people do not only have to consider whom to trust and whom not to multiple times a day, they furthermore have to decide at once. What does it take to assign or deny trust though?
Trust is an essential building block of society and acts as “social glue” (Bakir and Barlow 2007). The study of trust and its components, therefore, is far-reaching and rightly a deeply researched topic as it carries many implications and derivations for our day-to-day life. Communication and trust thereby are two highly interlinked concepts, for language works as a trust enabler and a means to build trust:
(…) human language offers an endless repertoire of significant symbols to convey one’s perspective to others. It is the most important medium of communication in the development of trust and for the successful constitution of a trust relation. (Rompf 2015)Footnote 1
This article is concerned with the how exactly trust and communication are intertwined: Is it the voice itself which demands for trust or rather the content? If so, how does that content have to be structured to evoke trust? How is trust transported linguistically? And what role does the listener hold? As the established question is multi-layered, it is crucial to first define trust and the character traits that form it. Hereinafter—and only focussing on spoken language—paraverbal, nonverbal as well as content-related features leading to a development of trust on the listener’s side are compiled and described to answer the question “How can communication be utilized to build trust?”.
2 What Is Trust?
Based on a multidisciplinary analysis by Rousseau et al. merging economical, psychological, and sociological views, trust can be defined as “a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another” (Rousseau et al. 1998). It is however a delicate concept to define as it has many contrasting manifestations and is highly subjective. To nevertheless get to a clear-cut understanding of trust, a definite distinction from related terms trust partly consists of—namely persuasion, confidence, and credibility—needs to be established.
Persuasion is classified as one of the major components in creating trust. It can be defined as speaker-dependent emotional and rational strategies to encourage opinion changes (Renn and Levine 1991). In using persuasive strategies, a speaker/message will succeed in generating trust in a given audience. Studies moreover show that persuasion and credibility correlate significantly (Burgoon et al. 1990).
A confident source is one which proves to be trustworthy over an extended period of time. It achieves and holds its status by positive reinforcement (Renn and Levine 1991). Credibility finally is accomplished by adding up confidence and trust on a social scale, as it has a distinctively social dimension and is agreed upon by collective perception. Credibility “is a major medium of power control and social influence” (Renn and Levine 1991).
Based on these distinctions, the following streamlined value chain of trust can be put in place (Fig. 1).
With persuasion being the basic building block in trust development, following chapters will especially focus on this character trait’s content related and linguistic expressions.
From a neurobiological view, trust results from oxytocin being produced and released in the brain, as evidenced in studies by Kosfeld et al. (2005). When infused with the neuropeptide, people in interpersonal interactions (note that communication falls into that category) showed a substantial increase in trust towards their vis-à-vis in comparison with a control group given a placebo (Kosfeld et al. 2005). Trust therefore is a measurable and influenceable hormonal variable, not only a theoretical concept which people can apply at will. As the oxytocin release in the brain still has to be triggered by something perceived and/or experienced—be it physical or psychological—the question remains, how trust is built? To answer this, the following paragraph elaborates on the characteristics trust consists of. Researchers propose a scheme that clusters five attributes which, when taken together, form trust (Renn and Levine 1991). If a source (be it message and/or speaker) succeeds in integrating these characteristics, their message and demeanour will eventually evoke trust in a given recipient:
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Competence: expertise in a certain field
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Objectivity: absence of bias or partiality
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Fairness: multilateral presentation of facts
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Consistency: in comparison to previous utterances/behaviour
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Faith: faith in the source’s good intentions (Renn and Levine 1991).
There is no comprehensive formula stating how these five have to be distributed, nor do they have to be weighted equally to achieve a positive outcome. At first glance, none of these attributes is of a linguistic nature. They nevertheless do have verbal manifestations by means of which they are transported which will be elaborated on this research paper. A competent person simply sounds different than an incompetent one.
Aiming at a full understanding further on, trust has to be looked at from three perspectives, as source, distributor, and message are part of every interaction comprising trust and mutually dependent.Footnote 2
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The source is the background of every distributor or message and can take various shapes, e.g. an institution (with the message being a newspaper article) or the education and qualification of a distributor (in a public address); to be trusted, a source needs to be true and reliable (Renn and Levine 1991).
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The distributor is the messenger of a given message and will consistently be assessed in regard to the source and their background; competence and honesty are a distributor’s key properties in evoking trust (Renn and Levine 1991).
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Besides the actual text, every message carries assumptions about its source and distributor; its trustworthiness is dependent on accuracy, objectivity, and versatility (Renn and Levine 1991) (Fig. 2).
Renn and Levine’s characteristics for building trust can, once more, be clustered into three categories, namely credibility, emotionality, and rationality (Renn and Levine 1991) (Table 1).
These findings partially stem from and are consistent with Aristotle’s Rhetoric, in which he debates how an audience can be convinced of something by means of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, or following the classification above, credible (Ethos), emotional (Pathos), and rational (Logos) means (Braet 1992). With this knowledge about trust and the characteristics which form it in mind, the bridge between trust and communication becomes yet again clearer. The voice is considered as the means of expression and reflects a person’s personality traits (Hammer and Teufel-Dietrich 2017). Since the above-mentioned features are such personality traits (especially the Pathos ones), they can be transported linguistically. The voice as a means of communication therefore is a crucial part of any attempt to build trust.
3 Communication and Speech as Trust Enablers
The preceding chapter provided a definition of trust as well as neurobiological explanations for its development. It was stated that trust is a psychological state and, as a result, is impressionable to speech. However, this assertion has not yet been fully grounded. Trust as a psychological state is very much impressionable by speech, to the extent that Vygotsky—a main voice in the field of linguistics—even calls this “an indisputable fact of great importance” (Vygotsky 1994). “Thought development is determined by language” (Vygotsky 1994) and intellectual growth is crucially linked to thinking which is arrived upon by speaking (Vygotsky 1994). Without language, there would be no thought; without thought there would be no thinking; without thinking there would be no psyche. With trust being a psychological state as established earlier, it is at least influenced by language, more likely even initiated by it. Furthermore, the aforementioned positive expectations for intention and/or behaviour associated with trust are arrived upon by listening to someone speaking and assessing the used language. “Whenever agreement or assent is arrived at in human affairs (…), THIS AGREEMENT IS REACHED BY LINGUISTIC PROCESSES, OR ELSE IT IS NOT REACHED (emphasis in original)” (Whorf 1940). Correspondingly, trust must be regarded an agreement between trustor and trustee and is hence only reached by communication and communicative means in a linguistic process.
Regarding the addressed neurobiological cause of trust, oxytocin, findings indicate cerebral links between communication and trust (Kosfeld et al. 2005). The remaining question however is how the hormone release is triggered when not induced synthetically. As previously established, oxytocin is mainly produced in interpersonal interactions (Seltzer et al. 2010). These interactions are comprised of different channels, with one channel being the voice as a means to communicate. Studies with mother-daughter dyads which put the respective child in a stressful situation showed that the mother’s vocalisation caused the release of nearly as much oxytocin to fight the induced stress in the child as the mother’s physical contact with her child (Seltzer et al. 2010). The neuropeptide is essential in setting up social attachments, including trust, and is empirically shown to be directed by speech, more accurately prosodic and linguistic vocal cues (Seltzer et al. 2012). Further studies showed that it is in fact the voice itself, thus the auditory and not the content-related information, which causes the release of oxytocin in the listener’s brain as written communication did not elicit the same effect as spoken communication (Seltzer et al. 2012).
This leads to the conclusion that, at least on a neurobiological scale, the communicated content is unimportant or not as important in building trust as linguistic information. Therefore, at least Pathos—with Faith, Honesty, and Truthfulness building trust emotionally—is directed by hormonal signals which are orchestrated by a speaker’s voice. Regarding the issue as a whole, one cannot jump to conclusions yet, as building trust might still be dyadic with Ethos and Logos being rationally comprehensible and possibly content dependent. Building on the discussion of a dyadic formation of trust, the following chapters will provide further insights into different strategies in building trust with the aid of communication: first, the only just displayed emotional, also called affect-based, trust-building by means of the voice; and second what is referred to in this paper as the rational, also known as cognition-based, opportunities in trust-building, namely content related measures (Rompf 2015).
3.1 The Voice as Emotional Trust Builder: Paraverbal and Nonverbal Cues
Communication not only means speech, but rather a multimodal conglomerate consisting of verbal, nonverbal, and paraverbal linguistic cues (Beattie and Ellis 2017). This means listeners use more than one channel to split the speech flow they are exposed to into convenient sections before they ultimately interpret it. Hence, more than one channel is used and needed to build trust on the speaker’s side and experience trust on the listener’s side. A given listener assesses speech from various standpoints and might not even focus on what is said exactly. The content only functions as auxiliaries, it is “behaviours which accompany speech [that] may emphasize it, contradict it or even substitute for it” (Beattie and Ellis 2017). An audience therefore finds itself in a perpetual interplay between what it hears and what it perceives. The same goes for trust. A person may seem trustworthy and utter supposedly trustworthy statements, but an audience may still not put trust in them. This is because the audience reads linguistic cues, consisting of paraverbal and nonverbal information which potentially contradict the aforementioned impressions.
One of the building blocks responsible for creating trust is persuasion, a very well-studied character trait in regard to its linguistic manifestations. The following section illustrates how persuasion—and hence trust—is expressed paraverbally and nonverbally.
Paraverbal Trust-Building Cues
Paraverbal communication is concerned with how someone talks which e.g. includes speech rate, volume, and tone of voice. Vocal characteristics have been shown to have a significant impact on how a speaker is perceived, including in regards to persuasiveness and therefore trust (Jackob et al. 2011). Vocal intensity, dynamic speaking style, and vocal pleasantness are all parameters which contribute to a speaker’s trustworthiness. Since they partly overlap, the different subchapters will vary in detail.
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Vocal intensity refers to speaker specific variations in amplitude (which means loudness), intonation (meaning perceptible pitch changes), fluency, and tempo. To be assessed as trustworthy, a relatively high speaking volume (loudness being the technical term) needs to be aimed at. Speakers with a more intense and/or powerful voice tend to be viewed as more persuasive than people with a softer and more quiet voice (Shim et al. 2015). The average loudness of a normal conversation is gender dependent, at 58.84 dB(A) for female and 59.84 dB(A) for male speakers. Transferred in hertz, values amount in 166 Hz for female and 110.6 Hz for male speakers. During a lecture or a talk, the loudness increases and stabilises at 66.79 dB(A) for women and 67.82 dB(A) for men (respectively 196.7 Hz for women and 128.9 Hz for men) (Berger et al. 2014). In order to increase one’s persuasiveness through loudness, these respective values should in no case be undercut, at least be matched, and at best slightly exceeded.
Variations in intonation and amplitude allow a speaker to be perceived as more trustworthy due to more liveliness and less monotony in their message (Shim et al. 2015). Hence, engaging in perceptible pitch (intonation) and amplitude changes over the course of a communicative attempt will increase a speaker’s trustworthiness. Variations in pitch and amplitude can be achieved by following linguistic principles like rising intonation when asking a question and dropping intonation when making a point. Emphasising a phrase will automatically lead to a change in amplitude and as such in loudness. These cues furthermore organise the speech flow and emphasise a message’s most essential parts. Here, intonation as well as amplitude may result in a content-related simplification, transported by linguistic cues, that result in a listener’s better understanding of a topic. It will be established later on that this type of simplification culminates in ascribing trust.
Fluency is one of the most straightforward and relatively effortless ways of generating trust. On the listener’s side, it allows them to easily follow the red thread; on the speaker’s side, a message can be prepared in advance to be flawless in this regard. A fluent speaking style means one which lacks the use of pause fillers, lengthy pauses, halting speech, stuttering, hesitations, repetitions, sentence changes, and interrupted vocalisations (Burgoon et al. 1990; Shim et al. 2015). Non-hesitant speech is perceived as dynamic and competent and it is because of these attributes that an audience assigns trust to a speaker who masters fluent speech. As fluency is correlated with competence, it holds not only an emotional, but also a rational dimension and is hence of some importance.
The last parameter contributing to vocal intensity is tempo, also referred to as speaking rate. Speaking rate was empirically found to enable trust when being “somewhat quickened” (Burgoon et al. 1990). A speaker producing less than 50 words per minute is considered very slow, slow when uttering 50–90 words/minute and normal when articulating more than 90 words/minute (Franke 2016).Footnote 3 In evaluating “Tagesschau”-newscasters, anchors were found to have a significantly increased average speaking rate of 129.6 words per minute (2.16 words per second) (Gebhard 2012), making them persuasive and trustworthy through confidence.
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Dynamic speaking style A dynamic speaking style can be obtained by considering loudness, pitch and its emphasis, and variety as well as tempo. All these cues are parameters that fall under both dynamic speaking style and vocal intensity. These parameters and related findings on their status as trust enablers were established earlier in this paper. It should be noted that they create trust in both their function as dynamic and intensity criteria (Burgoon et al. 1990; Shim et al. 2015), and that a dynamic speaking style enhances a speaker’s perceived trustworthiness.
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Vocal pleasantness is marked by fluency, pitch variety, and voice quality. As fluency and pitch variety were covered under vocal intensity, this paragraph is only concerned with voice quality. The clearer the voice quality, the more persuasive the obtained effect (Burgoon et al. 1990). In the research field of linguistics, different vocal qualities are distinguished: breathy, flat, thin, throaty, and orotund. A breathy voice sounds quite aspirated, resulting in an airy, sighing-like, and intensity-low sound (Pompino-Marschall 2009). The flat voice is marked by a more monotonous and repetitive audible impression; whereas an orotund voice reflects expressiveness, robustness, and full soundness. A thin voice resembles a flat voice and is described as reedy and unsupported (Montrey 2005). The throaty voice finally is defined as hoarse and rather rough or husky (Montrey 2005). Studies concerned with vocal pleasantness find gender specific differences in a voice’s perception.
While the highest degree of persuasion in both men and women can be achieved with an orotund voice, women with breathy, thin, and throaty speaking styles are judged less persuasive while a female flat voice did not lead to significant results. In concordance, a male breathy voice is judged as least persuasive, with flat, thin, and throaty voices assessed as only mildly better (Montrey 2005). An orotund voice is perceived as authoritarian and charismatic, which again attributes credibility and persuasion to a speaker (Rosenberg and Hirschberg 2005). Interestingly, findings propose that a “female speaker was afforded greater latitude to violate expectations of normal vocal characteristics” than a male speaker. This can be interpreted knowing that a female speaker’s voice is generally judged in regard to her social behaviour whereas a male voice is linked to his social status, with him being potentially powerful (Montrey 2005). A non-orotund speaking man may therefore be perceived as less authoritative while a woman will be evaluated more leniently as she may react to her specific time- and socially-dependent surroundings.
3.2 Nonverbal Trust-Building Cues
Nonverbal communication means a speaker’s communicative signals, which are not of a spoken nature, namely body language, facial expressions (including [a degree of] eye contact), and gestures.
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Gestures Many studies emphasise the importance of nonverbal cues, particularly gestures, for both speech production and speech perception, and even regard them as mutually dependent (Peters and Hoetjes 2017). This interdependence becomes more apparent when learning that speech and gestures are collectively obtained during language acquisition. In their capacity as structuring elements, gestures are a vital part of every communicative attempt and help listeners to more effectively organise the speech flow to which they are exposed. Being well understandable helps a speaker to create trust amongst their audience, hence the use of gestures is an effective means of acquiring trust. A study was conducted which evaluated the effect of gestures on persuasiveness (Peters and Hoetjes 2017). When asked about a speaker’s performance and characteristics, the study found a significant effect of gestures on perceived persuasiveness by the listener. Taking a closer look at those characteristics, there was also a main effect of gestures on the perceived sincerity and interestingness of a given speaker. There was however no effect on factual accuracy. This again shows the meaningfulness of a dyadic approach regarding the research of trust: sincerity and interestingness are both subjective, hence emotional impressions, whereas factual accuracy is of an objective and rational nature (Peters and Hoetjes 2017). An earlier passage in this contribution stated that linguistic information, not the content per se, can be a means to create trust on an emotional scale. Peters’ and Hoetjes’ results undermine these findings.
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Kinesic/proxemic behaviour Likewise nonverbal, kinesic/proxemic behaviour refers to building or reducing both physical and physiological distance between communicating parties (Comadena et al. 2007) by applying different strategies from actual movement to more subtle facial expressions or engaging in either self-adaptors (e.g. playing with one’s hair) or object-adaptors (e.g. playing with notes). Smiling, agreeing mimic behaviour, eye contact, and touch e.g. are subsumed under the term kinesic/proxemic immediacy, and are found to have a positive impact on persuasiveness. The more approachable a speaker appears, the more trustworthy they become to an audience. Despite a great deal of subjectivity involved in such an assessment, findings nevertheless were significant (Burgoon et al. 1990). The same study by Burgoon et al. also demonstrated that both kinetic dominance and kinetic relaxation are linked to persuasiveness. Although this may seem incompatible prima facie, it ultimately shows that listeners are not compelled by specific kinds of movements, but rather more by random movement itself (Burgoon et al. 1990). Conversely, the use of above explained object-adaptors is negatively correlated with persuasiveness, and hence trustworthiness (Burgoon et al. 1990). In sum, potent kinesic and proxemic behaviour establish a speaker as approachable, pleasant, and candid. This leads to them being perceived as trustworthy. As a substantial correlation between nonverbal behaviour and persuasiveness is evidenced in various studies, it can be regarded as probable secure that nonverbal performance enhances the creation of trust—on a subjective and emotional scale maybe, but verifiably nonetheless (Burgoon et al. 1990; Comadena et al. 2007; Peters and Hoetjes 2017).
This section provided an overview of paraverbal and nonverbal, and hence linguistic, cues which are a means for appearing trustworthy through persuasion. In applying some of the listed features, one may succeed in building trust through communication. There is, however, a fine line: exaggeration in any of the described parameters—besides maybe fluency—will result in a loss of trust as the speaker will come across as artificial and excessive. Illustrative loudness: a person with a soft voice may try to sound more persuasive by speaking up. This person may eventually end up talking too loudly to meet or exceed the indicated ~68 dB(A) and will not only not inspire trust, but rather the disapproval of the audience. After thoroughly outlining linguistic parameters resulting in trust, the next section will engage in clearing up the role of a message’s content in building trust in order to meet the criteria of a dyadic approach to trust analysis.
3.3 The Content as Rational Trust Builder
Linguistic information on a paraverbal and nonverbal level were found to have an impact on persuasiveness and trust. These cues can nonetheless not be evaluated thoroughly without their framework: the content of a message which in the end transports and supports the linguistic dimension. One of the more obvious characteristics of a trustworthy message is the utilisation of technical terms instead of colloquial language—not surprisingly, swear words do not encourage trust-building (Mika 1981). Depending on the general assessment of a speaker, accelerated and intensive vocabulary supports the development of trust when the respective speaker is already perceived as trustworthy, though evokes the opposite effect when judged as non-trustworthy (Hamilton et al. 1990). Predominantly passive sentence structures were found to trigger trustworthiness as they create the impression of neutrality/objectivity and distance, characteristics positively attributed with trust (Hurwitz et al. 1992).
A more personal speaking style with high occurrence of “I”, “We”, and “You” (as in the German polite form “Sie”) on the other hand also led to research subjects ascribing more trust to a respective speaker (Carbone 1975). These studies illustrate the high speaker-dependent dimension of persuasion, as both findings contradict one another. A positive correlation between distance to an audience and trust was also found by Ostermeier who established that self-references lead to an identification between speaker and audience and hence an increase in trust (Ostermeier 1967). Another finding concerning the sentence structure was identified when studying its complexity: the more complex a sentence, the more unlikely its rating as trustworthy—most likely due to comprehension challenges for the listener (the vocabulary on the other hand should be varied and complex, but lack abstraction to evoke trust) (Carbone 1975). Furthermore, metaphors and comparisons are said to lead to an increase in trustworthiness, though existing sources reveal somewhat inconsistent results on this matter. Additionally, images need to be particularly vivid, forceful, repeated, and varied frequently to be persuasive (Reinsch 1974).
A study by DeLemos et al. found a strong link between communication and trust and developed an acronym for this phenomenon: HICCC—meaning Honest, Inclusive, Compassionate, Clear and Comprehensive, and Coordinated (DeLemos et al. 2010).Footnote 4 In applying a HICCC speaking style, a speaker will succeed in building trust. Earlier mentioned findings mirror the importance of both emotional (Honest, Inclusive, and Compassionate) and rational (Clear and Comprehensive, Coordinated) trust-building parameters and hence support these results.
These insights into the possibilities of building trust through rational parameters by focussing on the content show that listeners do indeed use the rational level to assign or deny trust. Surprisingly, rationality is ostensibly much more difficult to successfully operate than emotion, as findings regarding the content are often inconsistent and much more speaker-dependent than linguistic parameters. At this point, the following conclusion can be drawn: emotional trust-building parameters may be subjective, but they are stable and speaker-independent whereas rational parameters are indeed more objective, but simultaneously unstable and speaker-dependent.
Looking into “ideal methods of persuasion” (Adler et al. 2015), Adler’s research group also confirmed that emotional positive strategies of trust-building were most effective compared to emotional negative, rational positive, and rational negative ones (Adler et al. 2015). These findings serve as justification to reconsider or rather expand the matched conceptual pairs emotional–subjective and rational–objective as it became clear that emotional trust-building measures are (1) in fact more objective than rational ones; and (2) more effective and reliable in building trust. A new composition can therefore be proposed as follows:
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Emotional trust-building—Subjective (in terms of perception)—Objective (in terms of processing).
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Rational trust-building—Objective (in terms of perception)—Subjective (in terms of processing).
4 The Listener’s Role in the Process of Building Trust
Trust is built rather subjectively. This leads to huge differences in people’s perception of trust (Rosenberg and Hirschberg 2005). Accordingly, trust is an interpersonal factor. The preceding chapters aimed at a broad explanation of how trust can be built and expressed linguistically, but did not yet take into account one further factor. Despite the speaker’s pivotal position in establishing trust, the listeners themselves play a role of some importance in a trust-building scenario. In fact, it all comes down to the audience and their respective engagement in a certain topic for a listener can take one of two so-called “routes”. First, the central route and second, the peripheral route (Peters and Hoetjes 2017).
These routes are contingent on the listener’s level of involvement in the speaker’s topic and are discussed extensively in recent and former studies as the “Elaboration Likelihood Model” or the “Heuristic Systematic Model” (Peters and Hoetjes 2017). Both models assume that there are two divergent ways a given listener can be persuaded by a message. If a listener takes the so-called central route, it means they use a more rational approach in assigning trustworthiness to a given speaker. This route is normally unconsciously selected if a listener has knowledge about the respective topic and is hence more involved. Listeners “engage in systematic thinking, they elaborate the arguments carefully and focus on the quality of communication content” (Jackob et al. 2011) before trusting a speaker. The peripheral route, conversely, is used by listeners in a more emotional manner, whilst focussing on superficial information with the content being incidental (Peters and Hoetjes 2017).
Via the peripheral route, a speaker will be assessed to a lesser extent by the quality of the given arguments, but rather by objective and emotional characteristics assigned to it. This peripheral approach will also succeed in persuading someone who is not paying particularly attention. In choosing the central route of persuasion, a listener will evaluate the content of an argument rather than the linguistic cues provided by a speaker. Hence, paraverbal as well as nonverbal information will not—or at least not to the same extent—be a means of persuasion and thus of building trust. A listener on the peripheral route will, on the contrary, be persuaded by exactly this kind of emotional information, namely linguistic cues and a speaker’s characteristics. The content will only be assessed superficially; the underlying mechanisms are past judgements, experiences, and observations.
5 Summary
This contribution showed that and how it is very possible to build trust through means of communication. It is potentially achievable for a speaker to appear trustworthy when projecting one’s voice and respecting linguistic, but also content-related rules and stipulations on both an emotional as well as on a rational level. Interestingly, emotional possibilities in building trust are in fact to a greater extent objective than initially thought; and on the contrary rational possibilities are subject to fluctuations in the attribution of trustworthiness.
Listeners themselves hold an essential role in the procedure of trust-building and should not be taken for being at a speaker’s mercy, as the more informed they are, the less they can be manipulated into trusting someone. Still, communication exercises a great deal of influence, despite the fact that one must keep in mind that it is a fine line between being a speaker creating trust and being an overachiever who ends up undermining trust. In appearing too artificial, one will hardly be perceived as trustworthy as this impedes the building of trust.
Now to come back to the five attributes building trust which were listed early in this contribution: Competence, Objectivity, Fairness, Consistency, and Faith (Renn and Levine 1991). Consistency and faith were the only characteristics not to have shown distinctive linguistic manifestations (although it cannot be ruled out that further research may obtain complementary results). Consistency may not have proven to be a considerable factor in creating trust since it requires listeners to take the central route of persuasion and focus on a speaker’s arguments. Faith, on the other hand, may just be overridden by persuasiveness per se. Intending to extend and modify Renn and Levine’s attributes (Renn and Levine 1991) tailored to a linguistic explanatory model of trust, the following adjusted scheme is proposed:
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Competence: expertise in a certain field
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Objectivity: absence of bias or partiality
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Fairness: multilateral presentation of facts
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Consistency: in comparison to previous utterances/behaviour (only relevant for central route users)
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Persuasiveness: speaker-dependent emotional and rational strategies to encourage opinion changes.
By being competent, objective, fair, consistent, and persuasive, a speaker will succeed in building trust. How these character traits are expressed through communication is depicted in the following table, which shows all linguistic features for building trust included in this research paper. These features are to be understood as cautious recommendations for action (Table 2).
Though verified by scientific research, trust-building mechanisms such as the listed ones only convince listeners who use the so-called peripheral route of persuasion. In an ideal environment, rational and objective persuasive strategies would outdo emotional and subjective ones, but these scenarios rarely occur. The following figure mirrors this observation and shows the weighting of the logos-dimension, which reflects the central route of persuasion, and the ethos and pathos-dimension, displaying the peripheral route of persuasion. The less “ideal” a situation, the more ethos and pathos come into play (Fig. 3).
This is, in fact, problematic as it means that it is mainly listeners with less access to education and limited information on a certain topic who are at risk of putting their trust in someone they potentially should not. It is crucial to eliminate this risk factor by investing in information procurement and information flow to guarantee media literacy throughout education classes. In doing so, the logos- dimension is strengthened and users are empowered to adopt the central route of persuasion to impartially evaluate a speaker’s trustworthiness and avert the potential misuse of communicative power.
Notes
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Speech and Communication will be used as synonyms throughout this article as communication contains speech in its verbal and nonverbal form.
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This figure does not display the recipient of a given message despite their great importance because it is, for now, only concerned with building trust on the speaker’s side.
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Note: speaking rate is language-dependent, values may therefore change in comparison; the here listed numbers are representative for German.
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The study was conducted in a clinical environment with patient’s parents in the PICU. Findings can nonetheless be seen as being generally valid even outside this setting as the communicative behaviour resembles crisis communication and is therefore an exemplary extreme case of building trust by means of communication.
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Meck, AM. (2019). Communication and Trust: A Linguistic Analysis. In: Osburg, T., Heinecke, S. (eds) Media Trust in a Digital World. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30774-5_6
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