Delivering a message by voice, even an artificial one, can be more compelling than putting it in writing

In this age of screens, smartphones, virtual assistants, and voice-enabled speakers, we are constantly bombarded by visual and auditory suggestions of things to do, products to buy, and media to consume. Yet are all these messages created equal? According to new research published in Psychological Science, the answer is no: Recommendations that are heard rather than read have a greater influence on our behavior. In the spring of 2018, Shwetha Mariadassou and Chris Bechler, both graduate students at Stanford Graduate School of Business, were sitting in a seminar taught by marketing professor Jonathan Levav, in which they were studying how different types of messages affect decision-making. They learned that people generally perceive someone as more intelligent and competent when they convey spoken information rather than delivering the same message in writing. As she and Bechler chatted after class, Mariadassou recalls, “We wondered, ‘What would happen if you apply this to recommendations?'” Would hearing a recommendation for a product or service influence consumers’ decisions differently? Would they be more likely to buy something based on the word of a smart speaker over a website? “Voice technology is such a fast-growing technology segment right now,” Mariadassou says. “We wanted to see what would happen when we present recommendations in both modalities.” So Mariadassou, who is pursuing her Ph.D. in marketing, spearheaded a research project to investigate. She believed there is “a general perception that people act on auditory and visual information the same way”—and wanted to […] Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

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