Submitted by Administrator on Mon, 25/02/2019 - 12:25
A Thin Slice of Science Communication: Are People’s Evaluations of TED Talks Predicted by Superficial Impressions of the Speakers?
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TED talk videos are a freely available and very popular medium for communicating "ideas worth sharing", often about scientific research or theories. A new paper investigates the extent to which people's evaluations of these talks can be predicted by superficial impressions of the speaker formed on the basis of their appearance and body language.
In a pre-registered experiment, participants either viewed a selection of talks in their entirety and answered a range of questions about their content and quality, or viewed short, silent excerpts and rated the extent to which the speaker appeared to display core socio-cognitive traits such as competence or trustworthiness.
People's evaluations of the full-length videos suggested that the TED talks were judged on two dimensions: entertainment value and scientific quality. These dimensions were correlated but distinct -- so a talk might be regarded as good because it is fun, clear, or worthy of sharing on social media even if the actual content is not regarded as especially impressive.
More importantly, neither the entertainment-value nor the scientific-quality judgments were predicted by demographic characteristics of the speaker (gender, age, ethnicity) or by socio-cognitive trait attributions made on the basis of their appearance and body language.
This is quite different from domains such as politics, where superficial trait evaluations have been found to predict a range of important outcomes, and is arguably reassuring: presumably, we want "ideas worth sharing" to be evaluated on the basis of the ideas, not superficial visual features of the person describing them!
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