Communication Style in the Republican Primaries

Several posts on this blog discuss the topic of leadership, Trump, and rhetoric. I will add to this set of posts an article by three Canadian psychologists. Ahmadian et al. discuss Trump’s communication style. The article is based on research that compares Trump with his main opponents in the Republican primaries. The authors wrote the article prior to Trump’s general election win. They examined 27 speeches each of which involved 30 minutes or more of continuous speech not prompted by a question. The speeches averaged about 38.5 minutes. All the speeches were early speeches (each candidate’s announcement speech and two other early speeches). They also examined the Twitter accounts of all 17 candidates during the three months prior to announcing their presidential bids.

Speech examination

The authors contend that Trump’s communication style played a more important role in his primary win than the program/policy details espoused by the candidates. They compared the speech style of each candidate to performance in the Republican primaries – the number of primaries won. In analyzing the speeches, the research framework focused on the applicability of three concepts: grandiosity, Informality, and vocal qualities.

Grandiosity

Grandiosity relates to narcissism. The authors examined grandiosity through individual word usage via two means. One was the use of “I-talk.” This refers to the use of first-person pronouns. Second, three blind coders coded the speeches and identified each act of boasting. They defined boasting as “talking with excessive pride and self-satisfaction about one’s achievement, possessions, or abilities.”

Trump’s speeches rated the highest in grandiosity and average was significantly higher than the average of the other candidates (p<0.001). The same was true of personal pronoun use (p<0.001). These two indicators of grandiosity were highly correlated.

Across all candidates, grandiosity was significantly correlated with success (number of primaries won) (p<0.001) but I-talk had no significant relationship to success.

Informality

Informality (in distinction from sophistication) was measured using a text analysis program called Linguistic Inquiry Word Count. Analytical thinking, formality, words per sentence, and words more than six letters determined sophistication -informality placement. The informal category included the use of swear words, net-speak (Btw, lol, thx), assents (agree, ok, yes), and non-fluencies (er, hm, or umm), or fillers (I mean or you know). Analytical thinking captures how much an individual uses formal, logical, and hierarchical thinking patterns.

Twitter use was also a measure of informality. The total number of tweets during the three months prior to announcing their presidential bids measured Twitter use.

Trump scored significantly higher than the other candidates on both LIWC informality (p<0.001) and Twitter usage (p<0.01). Both were correlated with success (p<0.001 for Tweet rate and p<0.01 with LIWC informality).

Voice analysis

A program called PRAAT obtained the mean pitch and pitch variance of the speeches. Generally, voters see politicians, especially men, with a lower pitch as having more attractive voices and give them more votes than those with higher-pitched voices. Pitch variability refers to varying one’s voice, an aspect of dynamic speech.

Trump did not show a higher mean pitch compared to the other candidates. However, Trump scored highest in pitch variability among the candidates (p<0.005) Pitch variability was positively correlated with primary wins (p<0.02).

Conclusion

Ahmadian et al. had several hypotheses regarding Trump and his communication style. The research confirmed all but the one about voice pitch. Overall Trump’s communication style was much more grandiose and informal and contained greater pitch variation than all the other candidates. The authors believe these findings make Trump’s success in securing the nomination less surprising. They suggest that a populist communication style – one that is grandiose, dynamic, and informal – became more significant than specifics about programs and policies.
Their concluding point: “person evaluations appear to be strongly associated with indirect non-verbal information such as voice quality and word usage. Stylistic factors may have the most impact because processing them requires less effort than the taxing analysis of complicated political platforms. Whether these behaviors are conscious strategies or automatized habits cannot be answered here.”

The authors note that their study addressed only Republican voters, and it is possible that they are especially responsive to grandiosity and informality.

Comment

The finding regarding pitch variability is not unusual. Most experienced public speakers understand the importance of pitch variability and use it very effectively. Monotone speakers have a difficult time holding a listener’s attention.

The other two findings are interesting and make me wonder if our post-truth environment encourages a certain kind of communication style. While there are a variety of definitions of the phrase post-truth, they all provide a sense that emotions, beliefs, and personal opinions are more important and influential than factual information. I consider a style that is grandiose and informal to be an emotional style of oral communication. Such a style, especially in the political world, may be significantly more influential than an analytical, rational-logical, or more sophisticated style of communication.

Clearly, Trump’s oral communication style, according to this research, was very different than that of his primary opponents. Trump’s oral communication style seems not much different as president than it was as a candidate. Ahmadian et al. do not track content such as lies and mistruths but lies and mistruths may get more attention than tweets about the truth and spark more emotion in followers.

The Tweet rate finding should be explored further. Research suggests that narcissists use social media platforms more than non-narcissists. Additionally, the research suggests that the favorite social media platform for grandiose narcissists is Twitter. This may occur because they can frequently and quickly add posts. Twitter users also have little need for reciprocal relationships and can find validation in large numbers of weak relationships. Grandiose narcissists generally use Twitter for self-focused tweets. They use Twitter primarily for purposes of attention-seeking, such as for seeking social status and admiration, and career promotion. It may be the case that because of their need to gain attention they more often write tweets that are negative (negative emotional language) and engage in anti-social behavior, such as cursing.

This may imply that politicians who are not grandiose narcissists use Twitter less frequently and in ways that do not stir up much emotion among their followers. In the post-truth era, this may be a disadvantage.

Another factor that may influence communication effectiveness refers t be the size of the audience. Political speeches generally target large in-person audiences or mass media audiences through television, radio, or podcasts. One might suggest that while grandiosity and informality may be beneficial with such audiences, such oral communication may not work as well with small groups or employees. Some research suggests that exaggerated or grandiose narcissists tend to wear out there welcome fairly quickly with subordinates and direct reports. I will try to address these issues in more detail in future posts.