BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

How To Convey Power With Your Voice

This article is more than 9 years old.

Before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister of the United Kingdom, she went through extensive voice coaching designed to make her sound more powerful. The coaching did three things to her voice: It raised the pitch at which she spoke, it kept that pitch steady and it helped her vary the volume of her voice while she was talking.

Now a study just published in the journal Psychological Science by professors at San Diego State and Columbia Business School suggests that Thatcher may not have needed to go through all that coaching. Just imagining that you are in a position of power can result in modulations to your voice that will make others believe that you are indeed powerful.

“Subtle manipulations of power such as simply thinking about a time when you had power can give you a more dynamic voice that’s also in control,” says Adam Galinsky, a professor in the management division at Columbia who has spent the last 15 years publishing 150 articles on leadership, power and negotiations, among other topics. I’ve covered Galinsky’s work before, most recently in a post last year where I described a paper where he made a similar suggestion: Prep by imagining yourself in a position of power like running a club or if you’re a parent, disciplining your kids, and you will dramatically improve your performance in a job interview.

The motivation for the most recent paper was Galinsky’s curiosity about ways that speakers could project power using their voice and whether the methods he’d tested before, about envisioning yourself in a power position, could translate to actually changing your voice and prompting other people to think that you, like Margaret Thatcher, do wield power. Galinsky thought it would and the paper proves him right. He worked on the project with two professors from San Diego State, Melodie S. Sadler and Sei Jin Ko, who has studied how pitch affects what speakers convey.

To test their theory the researchers gathered a group of 161 undergraduates at Northwestern University and first recorded them reading a passage so they could measure their natural speech patterns. Then they randomly assigned the students to two groups, one they called “high rank” or powerful, and the other, “low rank.” They told those in the high-rank group to imagine one of four scenarios--that they were going into a negotiation exercise with either a strong alternative offer, with valuable inside information, with high status at work or with the recollection of a time when they had power. The researchers told the low-rank group to imagine four different scenarios—that they had a weak alternative offer, no inside information, low status at work or the memory of a time when they lacked power.

Then the researchers recorded the students saying the following: I’m glad that we are able to meet today and I am looking forward to our negotiation. I know that you and I have different perspectives on some of the key issues and these differences would need to be resolved for us to come to an agreement.”

When the researchers listened to the recordings they found that the voices of the students who had imagined they had power before making their speech about negotiating, went up in pitch and became more monotone, with less variation in pitch, though they varied their voice in volume—a lot like Margaret Thatcher, post-voice coaching. The voices of the students assigned to the low-power roles lacked those attributes

In the second part of the study, the researchers gathered a group of 40 students at San Diego State and had them listen to the recordings made in the first experiment. Going in, the students didn’t know who was in which group. After listening to each recording, on a scale of one to seven they ranked the voices on each of six high-rank measures and six low-rank measures like “do you imagine this person as someone who frequently interrupts others?” (high rank) and “how uncomfortable at making direct eye contact do you imagine this person to be?” (low rank). They were able to tell which of the participants in the first study were in the high- and low-rank groups. Though there is one detail that especially interests me: the “perceivers” were more able to detect high rank among males than among females. [T]he effect of speakers’ sex on perceivers’ accuracy may reflect males being more adept in high-rank roles than females are,” says the paper. I would strongly disagree and cite Mrs. Thatcher as a case in point. Rather I’d say inherent sexism on the part of the listeners could explain this result.

One other note about the perceivers: In contrast to what the first part of the study showed, listeners did believe that a loud voice connoted power. This doesn’t surprise me. If my boss were to get up in front of a group and speak quietly, so I could barely hear him, it would make me think that he’s not confident about what he wants to convey (my boss is an excellent public speaker and would not do this). In fact for me, what conveys power is the substance of what the speaker says, not the pitch or the variability of volume. Though perhaps if I did the experiment and the speakers were all saying the same thing, I’d think the high-rank people seemed more powerful. Certainly I found Mrs. Thatcher to be a forceful speaker.

For Galinsky, the most important takeaway is similar to what he’s found in other studies he’s done on power: Envisioning yourself in a position of power before you speak or head into an interview can greatly up your chances of coming off as powerful and confident. “The easiest thing to do is before you speak, think about a time in which you had power. That will have the effects you want to have without you having to have conscious control over your voice.” Voice coaching can’t hurt either.