Does disfluency affect social judgments and decisions? Evidence from spontaneous speech

Disfluency in speech (e.g., English um and uh, also known as filled pauses) has long been argued to have social costs for the speaker. However, this conclusion is based on a limited set of measures obtained for scripted, lab-recorded speech. Here, using stimuli from spontaneous speech and an expanded set of social trait evaluations, we argue that phenomena typically described as "disfluency" are not always evaluated negatively. First, at the global person level, filled pauses did not affect the overall perceived competence, trustworthiness, or warmth of the speaker as a person (Experiment 1). However, at the local conversation level, filled pauses reduced perceived speaker trustworthiness within a conversation (Experiment 2). Furthermore, within a conversation, speakers who produced filled pauses were rated as less ready and less certain than speakers who did not (even though experts who used filled pauses were more likely to be considered careful than novices; Experiment 3). Finally, speakers using filled pauses were more likely to be avoided in future interactions (Experiment 4). Together, these data reveal flexible and detailed mappings of speech features such as disfluencies to social attributes and showcase the value of studying social meaning using speech generated beyond the lab.