Characterising the linguistic chameleon 1

Linguistic style accommodation between conversationalists is associated with positive social outcomes. We examine social power and personality as factors driving the occurrence of linguistic style accommodation, and the social outcomes of accommodation. Social power was manipulated to create 144 face-to-face dyadic interactions between individuals of high versus low power and 64 neutral power interactions. Particular configurations of personality traits (high self-monitoring, Machiavellianism and leadership, and low self-consciousness, impression management and agreeableness), combined with a low power role, led to an increased likelihood of linguistic style accommodation. Further, greater accommodation by low power individuals positively influenced perceptions of subjective rapport and attractiveness. We propose individual differences interact with social context to influence the conditions under which non-conscious communication accommodation occurs. Linguistic style, communication accommodation theory, personality, social power, impression formation, linguistic accommodation, interpersonal communication CHARACTERISING THE LINGUISTIC CHAMELEON 3 Characterising the Linguistic Chameleon: Personal and Social Correlates of Linguistic Style Accommodation The unconscious mimicry of our conversational partners seems to be an intrinsic part of social interaction (Chartrand, Maddux, & Lakin, 2006). Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) is a comprehensive conceptual framework describing the ways in which people adjust their communication behaviours during social interactions, their motivations for doing so and the social consequences (Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991). CAT proposes that during conversation, each speaker makes ongoing evaluations about their partner and the interaction, and such attributions form the basis of adjustments to their communication behaviours each speaker makes within this and future interactions (i.e., communication accommodation). Adjustments can take several forms: convergence describes when people alter their communication behaviours to be more similar to others, whilst divergence describes ways in which people accentuate dissimilarities in communicative behaviours. Within CAT, accommodation is driven by speaker motivations, formed according to perceptions of their partner’s communications and the wider social context of the conversation (Giles et al., 1991). Convergence is motivated by the desire (consciously or unconsciously) to gain social approval, and thus acts as an expression of internal motivations to affiliate. Divergence, on the other hand, represents the desire to emphasise or increase social distance between conversationalists. Another central concept within CAT is that people form impressions and evaluate their interaction partners based on perceptions of their communications. Perceptions of convergence in communicative behaviours has been associated with greater evaluations of similarity and liking (Giles, Taylor, & Bourhis, 1973), whereas divergence has generally been associated with evaluations of hostility or impoliteness (Giles & Gasiorek, 2014). A recent meta-analysis of CAT work concluded that CHARACTERISING THE LINGUISTIC CHAMELEON 4 accommodative behaviour is reliably related to positive evaluations of the communication, the individual and the relationship and non-accommodation is associated with negative evaluations (Soliz & Giles, 2014). Our study concerns a specific aspect of communication accommodation, that of an individual’s linguistic style. Linguistic style refers to not what an individual says, but how they say it; two individuals can communicate the same information (the same message content) but convey it in very different ways (their linguistic style). An important aspect of an individual’s linguistic style is their use of function words (such as pronouns and articles: he/she, on, its), which can be thought of as the ‘glue’ holding the content of a sentence together. Function words are usually short, frequently used, and processed and produced non-consciously (Chung & Pennebaker, 2007). Function words have little independent semantic meaning and their use relies on shared social knowledge; for instance, comprehending the sentence “he sat down on it” relies on conversationalists sharing an understanding of what (“it”) and who (“he”) is being referred to in that particular social context. By linguistic style, we thus refer to the way an individual uses function words, consistent with definitions adopted by related work in this area (Chung & Pennebaker, 2007; Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Lee Bo Pang, & Kleinberg, 2012; Ireland et al., 2011). A range of evidence suggests a link between an individual’s use of function words and social behaviours (Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010). Pronoun use, for example, has been proposed to be indicative of social status: high status individuals use I words less and you/we words more than low status individuals (Kacewicz, Pennebaker, Davis, Jeon, & Graesser, 2013). The extent to which two conversationalists are synchronised in their linguistic style (i.e., use similar proportions of function words) has also been proposed to represent their interpersonal alignment (Ireland et al., 2011). Indeed, much of the current literature surrounding synchronisation in linguistic style has focused on its value in predicting social CHARACTERISING THE LINGUISTIC CHAMELEON 5 outcomes. For instance, where conversationalists were synchronised in their linguistic style, this has positively predicted successful outcomes of negotiations (Taylor & Thomas, 2008) and the likelihood of initiating a romantic relationship amongst speed-daters (Ireland et al., 2011). Synchronisation in linguistic style does therefore seem to represent the degree to which dyads are engaged with each other in conversation, suggesting that the study of function word use between conversationalists taps into implicit social processes. An underexplored question in this area concerns the factors that predict the likelihood of synchronisation in linguistic style actually occurring, within any given conversation. CAT proposes that the goals, beliefs and predispositions individuals bring to a given communication encounter (their initial orientation) influence how people may adjust their communications (Dragojevic, Gasiorek, & Giles, In press). Factors influencing an individual’s initial orientation are described as macro-factors, and can include an individual’s interpersonal history and sociocultural norms. For instance, sociocultural norms influenced the likelihood that people in Hawai’i changed the language they spoke from Pidgin English to Standard English when in a work or education environment (Marlow & Giles, 2008). In our study, we extend previous research into the examination of macro-factors in communication accommodation, to accommodation in an individual’s linguistic style. Given that we cannot consciously control our use of function words, examining the factors that influence accommodation in linguistic style has the potential to highlight the conditions under which non-conscious communication accommodation can occur. Factors at both the social contextual and individual level are already predicted within CAT to influence an individual’s tendency to accommodate (or not) aspects of their communicative behaviours (Giles, 2008). We briefly review the evidence relating to two such factors that we believe may be influential in accommodation of linguistic style: social power and personality.