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posted by martyb on Monday July 21 2014, @01:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the Fake-Your-Way-To-The-Top dept.

Businessweek brings us news of How to Get Ahead by Speaking Vaguely. Projecting power is incredibly simple: just communicate in abstractions. Details convey weakness.

In one of the seven experiments, participants read quotes from a politician who described an earthquake as killing 120 and injuring 400; later, when he simply said it was a national tragedy, subjects thought he was a better leader.

An author of the study, Cheryl J. Wakslak (University of Southern California), cautions however against meaningless business jargon — words such as "ideaate" and "deliverables" that some workers resort to when trying to seem impressive. "Being completely vague will just make you sound stupid," she explains. "Bulls———is best when it has a kernel of truth in it."

The report was published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the full report is available at Using Abstract Language Signals Power (pdf)

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 21 2014, @04:23AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 21 2014, @04:23AM (#71709)

    > speaks loudly to the issue of voters choosing a candidate they 'like' (feel is more powerful?)
    > over choosing how they would prefer to see the country be managed.

    I don't think it is all that revealing.

    Fundamentally the voters must leave it up to the experts. Very few normal people have the time or expertise to make a meaningful judgment of policies. They look for someone who appears to feel the way they do and expect them to take care of the details. Even if the candidates do make specific policy commitments, the vast majority of voters will only understand them through the interpretation of pundits who typically have their own partisan agendas. Might as well just leave the pundits out of the loop.