［社会］Americans Are Fast to Judge

D4：

说话也能暴露社会阶层？你还敢畅所欲言吗？

科学美国人

Based on a new set of scientific studies, people can determine our social class by the way we talk. In one study, Professor Kraus asked 229 people to listen to 27 different speakers who varied in terms of their age, race, gender and social class. The study participants heard each speaker say a total of seven different words. Based on just this short audio, 70% of participants were able to correctly identify which speakers were college-educated.

Therefore, in another study, they ran an experiment where 302 participants were asked to talk about themselves without explicitly mentioning anything about their social class, such as job names. They found that participants were more accurate in judging where the speakers fell in terms of their social status. This finding suggests that we infer people’s social class largely from how they talk rather than what they say.

Taken together, this research suggests that Americans are able to easily detect one another’s social class from small snippets of speech. Moreover we use this information to discriminate against people who seem to be of a lower social class. Most of us are aware that employment laws protect us from being unfairly discriminated against for characteristics beyond our control, such as gender or race. This research identifies social class as another potential way that employers may discriminate against candidates, perhaps without even realizing it.

There is a lot more research that needs to be done before we can draw firm conclusions about how social class impacts discrimination. Researchers could test whether making hiring managers more aware of social-class bias changes their judgments about candidates. Hopefully this paper will spur more scientists to pay attention to the ways in which speech plays a fundamental role in creating and maintaining social inequality.