Implicit Preference for Communication Directness in the United States

Communication style is a distinct individual characteristic that observers may use to infer other attributes about the individual. In this paper, we theorize and demonstrate the implicit preference for communication directness in the United States – an implicit bias in favor of direct communicators that puts indirect communicators at a disadvantage in the assessment of their leadership potentials. Through 5 studies using different methodologies and samples, we reveal that communication directness is associated with more positive attributes like competence and honesty than is communication indirectness. Moreover, the perceived competence and/or honesty mediate the effects of communication directness on leader prototypicality perception and leader selection decisions in the organizational context. Finally, this implicit preference can be mitigated when factual information about competence or honesty is made salient. We discuss how our findings contribute to the individual perception, communication, and leadership literature and their practical implications in U.S. corporations and beyond