Couples with Similar Speaking Styles More Likely to Stay Together
It is a well known fact that people tend to date and marry other people who are similar to themselves in personality, values, and appearance, but a new study published in Psychological Science has added another important similarity to the list – speech style. The study found that people who speak in similar styles are more compatible with one another.
The researchers focused on what are called, “function words.” Function words are not nouns and verbs, but words that show how they relate, such as ‘the,’ ‘a,’ ‘be,’ ‘anything,’ ‘that,’ ‘will,’ ‘him,’ ‘her,’ and ‘and.’ Coauthor of the study, James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin, says that how we use these words makes up our writing and speech style.
Two studies were conducted to investigate the relationship between the speaking and writing styles people adopt while speaking with one another and the likelihood of future dating behavior and relationship success. The first study was based on speech and the second study on online chats.
In the first study, conversations between pairs of college students during 4-minute speed date sessions were recorded. Each pair conversed about the same set of topics, and although the conversations all sounded more or less the same, major differences in language synchrony were found. The pairs who had higher than average matching language style scores were nearly four times as likely to want future contact than those pairs who were out of sync.
The same pattern was found in the second study, which looked into online chats between dating couples over the course of 10 days. Three months later, nearly 80% of couples whose writing styles matched were still together, whereas only 54% of those who did not match as well were still together.
Pennebaker says that people do not consciously synchronize their speech. "What's wonderful about this is we don't really make that decision; it just comes out of our mouths."
