Accent Reduction Miami ®: Do people take you seriously if you speak with an accent? Studies say NO

I've often found that the primary reason people reduce their accents is to increase their credibility. This study confirms that Americans view people with accents as less credible. What do you think?

Do you have stories about being viewed as less credible because your accent? I do, in France, people thought I was stupid when I spoke French, and I'm a very educated woman. So I worked with a speech coach to lose my American accent for speeches I had to make in French. I couldn't believe the difference in how people treated me. Please share your story on our A ccent Reduction Miami® Group on LinkedIn!

Here's an article about a study done in Chicago that was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and USA TODAY.

Study: Americans with accents judged less credible than native speakers

By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY July 20, 2010

For the 24.5 million Americans who told the Census Bureau in 2007 that they spoke English less than "very well," it may not be their imagination that people don't take what they say quite as seriously as they do native English speakers. Researchers in Chicago have shown that people with a noticeable accent are considered less credible than those with no accent.

The stronger the accent, the less credible the speaker.

The researchers asked Americans to listen to native and non-native speakers of English making simple statements such as "A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can," and then judge how truthful they were. To guard against simple prejudice, the listeners were told the information came from a prepared script and wasn't based on the speaker's own knowledge. Even so, on a scale where 10 was most truthful, native English speakers got a score of 7.5, people with mild accents a score of 6.95 and people with heavy accents a score of 6.84. The paper is in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

"The accent makes it harder for people to understand what the non-native speaker is saying," Boaz Keysar, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and lead author on the paper, said in a statement.
"They misattribute the difficulty of understanding the speech to the truthfulness of the statements."

While research has clearly shown accent affects how a person is perceived, how much having an accent affected a person's credibility hadn't been known, he said. Even when the participants were told that the test was to determine whether accents influence how truthful people sound, the effect didn't go away. In that case, speakers with mild accents were considered as truthful as native speakers but those with heavy accents were judged less truthful.

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