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" Want to convince your boyfriend to see Water for Elephants instead of Fast Five? Or persuade your boss to let you take Friday off\u2014even though you didn&amp;#039;t request it a week in advance like you&amp;#039;re supposed to? Or even talk your way out of a ticket? The key might just be to speak quickly, say researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. They conducted telephone surveys and discovered that when speakers talked at a rate of 3.5 words per second, they were most persuasive and successful at getting others to agree to something. To give you a sense of what that sounds like, set a timer for 10 seconds and try to read the following sentences in exactly that amount of time: &amp;quot;I know that Fast Five is getting decent reviews and you really want to see it tonight, but I think you&amp;#039;ll like Water for Elephants. Plus Reese Witherspoon gets totally naked in it. Full frontal.&amp;quot; (No, that&amp;#039;s not actually true but we needed to make it exactly 35 words long.) The investigators believe that people who speak more slowly than 3.5 words a second &amp;quot;are seen as not too bright or overly pedantic&amp;quot; whereas those who talk at too fast a speed may seem &amp;quot;out to pull the wool over our eyes&amp;quot;, according to a report on the study on EurekAlert.org. And surprisingly, the pitch of your voice may not make much of a difference. &amp;quot;We assumed that interviewers who sounded animated and lively, with a lot of variation in the pitch of their voices, would be more successful,&amp;quot; one of the scientists explained. &amp;quot;But in fact we found only a marginal effect of variation in pitch by interviewers on success rates.&amp;quot; She added that too much pitch variation can come off as fake and trying too hard, so it&amp;#039;s probably best to keep your voice on a more even keel. We find it fascinating that the speed of your speech can play such a big role in how convincing you are, but we strongly believe the actual words you use probably have a bigger impact. Because, really, you could probably say the above sentences about going to Water for Elephants and Reese stripping down at any speed and still convince any guy to see it. Do you have any tricks for being persuasive? Have you ever noticed that how fast you speak makes a difference? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/a9313/speaking-quickly-makes-you-more-convincing/>