Biased? Moi? A sociolinguistic look at communication
Are you sitting comfortably? What is your Zoom etiquette? Are you comfortable being a new recruit with Zoom the only means to meet your peers?
No? That's unsurprising. On Zoom it is more difficult to pick up on the tiny clues, verbal and otherwise, that help us place people in context.
There’s more. Might you have a bias, conscious or unconscious, that affects your perception?
These are some of the questions sociolinguists try to answer. Their nuanced answers are crucial to the practice of public relations, because what is reputation management if it’s not about relationship building? Trusting first instincts may be common, but it may not be the best approach. Get it wrong and you’ve lost a potential client or persuaded a new recruit that your organisation is not for them.
Such bias is something that can affect the professional judgement of experts andit is often based on a notion of "knowing best", for example when a doctor meets a patient.
For consultants like Dr Timothy Graham at St George's University Hospital in south London, the pandemic has proved even more socio-linguistically challenging.
In his experience, before the pandemic, you would get a sense of a new patient from their GP's notes, and by the way they got up and walked towards you - those first 10 seconds were the most important.
We're sending more for scans to make sure we've got the right diagnosis.
“That would influence my opening question,' he says. "But now there are no clues.”
Listening intently does not compensate for the missing body language. The result? “We're sending more for people for scans to make sure we've got the right diagnosis.” Dr Graham adds.
Writing about "the objectivity illusion" for his presidential column in the journal of the Association of Psychological Science, Donald Redelmeier says: "Only the most exceptional physicians recognize their own personal biases and blind spots. More typically, they are like most humans in believing that they see objects, events, or issues 'as they really are' and, accordingly, that others who see things differently are mistaken."
His colleague Lee Ross coined the term "fundamental attribution error" to describe how we think people’s behaviour, rather than their situation, reflects their character - yet, we believe our own behaviour is a result of our environment.
What about PR professionals? We’re not doctors but we need just as good understanding of our own biases.
The Economist recently reported that the pandemic has made fonts friendlier, with cuddlier typefaces: "the visual equivalent of tone of voice, with rounded corners suggesting a human touch." Visual appeal is part of sociolinguistics because it contributes to first impressions.
The philosopher Noam Chomsky, "the founder of modern linguists", treats language as a human, biologically based, cognitive attribute. His Chomsky hierarchy codifies a set of rules for formal language theory, computer science and linguistics.
The most sophisticated level is the top one, "recursively innumerable" and the "Turing machine". This describes how a finite number of words can be deployed in countless ways. Alexa, perhaps? "Context sensitive" means what it says on the tin: Boris Johnson’s comment that closing mines helped the environment, in the context of climate change, did not land well with former mining communities where people had lost their jobs.
"Context free" and "push-down automata" might be likened to chatbots, which have a limited understanding of the words generated and may be able to improve their understanding. "Regular grammar" and "finite automata" are where it can go rather wrong: Google Translate, perhaps? A hydraulic ram is not a water sheep.
Chomsky explained that while the laws and principles of language are fixed, how it is used is free and infinitely varied. If we use words in the wrong context, wittingly or unwittingly, then our reputation suffers.
The following, with thanks to York University’s An Introduction to Sociolinguistics: Accents, Attitudes and Identity for the Future Learn series, are some of what can trip us up.
Accents (not the same as dialects, where the words may be different, like bap and bread roll) can be associated with positive and negative traits. Why do some customer service helplines employ people with a Scottish accent? Why did the Queen modulate her accent? The likely answer is that research has suggested the public reactions would be favourable.
Processor Henry Higgins trained the "common flower girl" Eliza Doolittle to speak "like a duchess" in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, or the movie My Fair Lady, if you prefer, so she could mix in the highest of societies.
She is not the only person to have changed an accent to make a better impression.
Jane Setter, Professor of Phonetics at the University of Reading, in her book - Your Voice Speaks Volumes, It's Not What You Say, But How You Say It - explores why we may think of some accents as being better than others. She points out that there are differences in speech habits between young and old, men and women. We make judgements about others' voices without noticing.
There are things we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say, we know there are some things we know we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
There’s a gender difference too. She notes that when women try to "upgrade" their accents, it’s perceived as a competitive move, and meets with disapproval. Men can apparently do both with impunity.
Does this matter in terms of reputation management? It depends on the client.
As the late US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: “There are things we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say, we know there are some things we know we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns: the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” That’s one way of describing Harvard University’s "Project Implicit" or bias. In it's Implicit Attitudes Test (IAT), participants are invited to choose from a list of possible topics and sort words relating to that topic into categories. A score is arrived at based on how fast the carry out this task.
The aim of the IAT is to measure the strength of association between concepts and evaluations. Explicit attitudes may be stereotypical, implicit attitudes "much less accessible to our conscious awareness and/or control".
So, as PR professionals, what can we do that Chomsky’s most sophisticated automata can’t?
United Robots already delivers automated news to 100 news sites. While that may be useful for busy editors whose staff have been cut, it is not likely to be meaningful to achieve context and nuance.
That’s where PR professionals, who understand context and nuance – socio-linguistics - whose self-awareness and knowledge of bias should inform their judgement, are better able to manage relationships and reputations with the media and with their clients.