Social Bias in Speech and more- Ted Bundy and the way you walk

The Sumner TCIS article really set up the connecting conversation of this weeks’ readings – investigating how we encode social information and bias in our everyday perceptions of speech. We communicate information by more complex mechanisms than the words themselves, as the article points out. In fact, it’s not just the way we speak; it’s the way we walk and sit up straight and chew gum and dress and any other number of actions. Sumner talks about gait as a potential social informant, and it made me think about an interview I once read of Ted Bundy, where he commented that he could tell a victim almost immediately, just by the way that she walked. If he was right, then body language informs predators. While a scary and dark idea, a recent psychological study showed psychopaths were significantly more successful than the general population at judging how likely it was a woman had been victimized in her past, just by the way she walked. I wonder how much information he could gain when he listened to people talk. It’s almost insane to think about, but every day we present information to the world that we aren’t intending, information, which when received, can influence other’s perceptions of us. Sumner points out our discriminatory behaviors: how we remember less of what marginalized accented speakers say compared to those speakers with idealized American accents (British for example). This prejudice extended to members of your own group, so even if you speak a marginalized dialect, you remember the words of your own linguistic group less!

            Because we infer so much from a speaker’s identity, it makes sense that we encode various semantic associations. In the King and Sumner article, listeners were shown to have trouble absorbing some information, when it was delivered by a speaker that didn’t fit with their expectations (the example of a child saying they’re pregnant). People code how probable certain speech is based on your identity, a finding that could have stigmatizing and damaging effects on minority groups and women. 

            With all of these social biases at play, it is only a matter of time before we take note and alter our presentation to others, given certain situations. I might speak at a slightly lower pitch in a board meeting, so as to be taken seriously, or walk “like a man” down the streets of New York City so as not to be ‘cat called’. In the article about Condoleezza Rice, Podesva et. al examine how Rice packages her identities as a politician appealing to public audiences – does she embrace some identities and hide others? Being a politically conservative, African American woman, born in the Southern US, who spent time in the West, and achieved extremely high levels of education, how does Rice navigate her belonging to these diverse social groups? Podesva et. al actually found her to be fairly a-regional, but she enunciated heavily (political), and maintained some vernacular elements of AAE, assumedly so that she might still strongly maintain her ties to African American communities in the US (though it can be hard to evaluate how intentionally she is displaying these identities). While it’s mind boggling to consider all of these constructions of our identities, we do this every day, in the way our voice changes when we pick up the phone to a stranger “Hello?” vs. a friend “Yo what’s up,” or to an interviewer, vs. your mother. It may seem trivial, but these are examples in which we cater our presentation to our audiences, with the knowledge that they are judging not just what we say, but how we sound. What implications does this have for those whose speech varies significantly from the norm, and how might society begin to address the widespread biases that inform our perceptions and decision making?