A Meta-Analysis and an Experiment Investigating the Effects of Speaker Disfluency on Persuasion

A meta-analysis of the speech disfluency literature suggested that the relationship between speaker disfluencies and competence judgments may be mediated. The theory of elaborative resistance production (TERP; Turner & Banas, 2007) was then applied to the effects of disfluencies on speaker persuasiveness. An experiment was conducted such that 240 undergraduate students watched a short video in which a speaker was either high or low reward and produced 0, 1, or 2 verbal disfluencies. Evidence was found consistent with a causal chain running from speaker disfluency to attitude-defensive cognitions, then to ratings of speaker credibility, and then to message acceptance.