Do callcenters even need to train their operators to get the ideal speaking rate?

I recently read an interesting article at nu.nl about the discovery that the speaking rate has a big influence on the degree of likelyhood that people will be convinced by the speaker. Apparently if someone speaks too fast, he or she comes across as untrustworthy. However, if someone speaks at a slower pace, he or she will seem more stupid toward listeners which will not be an advantage for convincing people.

For this reason a training for speaking at a rate of exactly 3,5 words a second plus regularly dropping short silences could be beneficial for companies that rely on convincing operating telephonists. Maybe training is not even necessary since it’s easy for people to imitate a way of speaking after hearing it for a while. That is why perhaps the operators should listen to a tape with a voice that speaks in the ideal pace every now and then during their work. In this way after a few phone conversations they can (again) be reminded to the ideal speaking rate and keep up talking like that.

Negotiating with a friend? Not as easy!

Let’s say you are very hungry and you have to negotiate with someone else about getting those sandwhiches. When would you use the most aggressive techniques to acquire as much as possible? When the other person is a friend, or a random person? Apparently the right answer is with a friend. Wanna know why? In this video Per van der Wijst, professor at Tilburg University explains:

Ku Klux Clan on Facebook!?

A recent topic at my study is social media, as their power can not be ignored by any organization. It made me think: What kind of organization would NOT have advantage by using social media as a marketing tool? It is hard to think of any, but then one of my housemates did actually mention the Ku Klux Clan. I decided to look the Ku Klux Clan up in different social media and it turns out that they are represented by a few facebook pages. However, they don't have that many 'friends', as in 5 to 10, whereas 'anti-Ku Klux Clan' pages tend to have more 'friends'. The same counts for Neo Nazi pages on Facebook. These could be examples of organizations that would not benefit so much from using social media, because members might want to keep their membership private. Of course there could be other reasons for the Ku Klux Clan not to have a big page on Fb or any other social media like Twitter. For example, maybe Facebook will delete it's pages as they get bigger, or maybe there are not that many members or followers in the world anyway (which would be a good thing). What do you think?

Probably the most alien, but human language...

A topic discussed during the course 'linguistics' that I found really interesting, was about the Piraha language. The Piraha are a tribe consisting of about 420 members who live in the Amazon in Brasil. They provided the perfect example of how much a language can differ from most known languages. It's in the Piraha's culture to always remain in their old habbits; unlike other amazonian tribes, they've hardy let the outside world influence their way of life.

This state of mind has led to some interesting differences in the Piraha language compared to all other languages. To start with, the Piraha language is rather simple and is the only language known to have no relative clauses or grammatical recursion. For example they can not say: "Johns' son has a dog", instead they have to say: "John has a son. The son has a dog". This video will illustrate this:

The Piraha language also has only three vowels and eight consonants. The words consist of many syllables and the verb structure is very complex. For example, the structure of the verb can indicate whether it was witnessed, it is certain or desired or not.

Furthermore do the Piraha not count, they have no numeracy at all. The only thing they can distinguish are a small or a larger amount. They also have no word for colors.