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If You Say ‘um’, You’re Lying
October 30, 2017 @ 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm
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What is it about the way that someone speaks that makes you think they’re lying? In this talk, Martin present a series of experiments looking at speech disfluency (“um or er”) and how it affects listeners’ judgements. In particular, he shows that judgements are affected *fast*: Listeners may have made their minds up long before the speaker has even got to the “lying” bit of what they’re saying. He goes on to explore the basis of listeners’ judgements: Are they using a simple rule where “um -> lie”, or are they taking circumstances into account? And… are they right? All to be revealed in 40 mins of cognitive psychology, including lego journalists.
About the speaker:
Martin Corley is Head of Psychology at Edinburgh University. His research centres on the information that is normally overlooked in human speech, from the particular ways in which the mouth moves to make sounds, to the “ums”, “ers”, and self-corrections that pepper our everyday conversation. He has supervised over 20 PhD students and published over 50 academic papers (including one on equine medicine, for some reason).