The Persuasive Effect of Nonverbal Cues in British Parliamentary Hearings

• In Event: Legislative Effectiveness and Policy Outcomes

Abstract

Whereas automated textual analysis has been used extensively to assess the content of texts in legislative settings (i.e., “what” was said), less attention has been given to the body language that accompanies speeches, testimony, debates and so on (i.e., “how” it was said). This study uses an experimental approach to measure the effect of nonverbal behaviour in the real-world setting of British parliamentary oversight hearings on economic policy during the 2010-15 Parliament.
Participants in the study were exposed to nine selected clips (about 5 minutes each), and then asked to render judgements (both in ordinal and open-ended responses) as to the overall competence and persuasiveness of the witness in each hearing. Two mechanisms were employed to operationalize nonverbal behaviour: first, a random separation of 120 subjects into two groups—one that only listened to selected clips from the hearings and the second that could also watch the questioner and witness in each clip (group type); and second, a four-part categorization of the nine hearing clips based on the degree of contention between questioner and witness (nonverbal exchange dynamic). The intent is to isolate the independent effect of nonverbal behaviour on the perceptions of the deliberative process, and particularly subjects’ impressions of the overall credibility of the witness who is providing evidence before the parliamentary committee.
The findings strongly suggest that nonverbal cues are pivotal for understanding and gauging deliberation in committee settings. However, they also reveal that studying nonverbal behaviour in deliberative settings is quite different from studying it in the speeches of politicians. In deliberative settings, the nonverbal exchange dynamic between questioner and witness is critical. For instance, the degree of confrontation between a parliamentarian and a witness (as measured by whether the parliamentarian was conciliatory or confrontational, and whether the witness was appeasing or combative) was found to have a highly significant effect on all three measures of the performance of the witness (quality of response, persuasiveness, competence). Importantly, a witness was gauged as performing “best” when his body language portrayed a robust response to a non-confrontational parliamentarian (i.e., his nonverbal behaviour was combative while his questioner was conciliatory). In highly conflictual exchanges (where both the parliamentarian and the witness are confrontational/combative), subjects judged the witness as performing the “worst”. This last finding suggests that in exchanges where both parties are confrontational, the potential for persuasion by an audience is highly compromised.
While the interactional dynamic between questioner and witness exhibited the most significant results, the effect of viewing the hearings—as opposed to only listening to them—was also seen to have generated notable findings. In the ordinal responses, where subjects simply ranked the performances of the witnesses, a significant difference was found between the two groups in how well the witness responded to the questioner. And, in the explanations given by subjects for their ordinal assessments of the witnesses, it was found that subjects who viewed the hearings (relative to those who only listened to the hearings) were significantly more likely to explain their reasons for assessing witnesses as they did in terms of nonverbal cues like eye contact, head movements, or facial expressions. In other words, the visual effect of seeing the witness give testimony appears to shape an audience’s judgements on the witness’s competence and persuasiveness in favour of nonverbal cues, while judgements based on verbal reasoning or logical argument exhibit no effect from the visual stimuli.
The findings of this study are part of a larger book project which examines deliberation in parliamentary hearings, using automated textual analysis, nonverbal coding and experimental methods, and extensive elite interviews with parliamentarians, Treasury officials and central bank officials.

Author

• Cheryl M. Schonhardt-Bailey, London School of Economics