Answering Too Fast Or Too Slowly: Social Perceptions and Response Latency

A set of two experiments investigated the effects of response latency on social attribution, and \ud whether there is an optimal duration of response latency in which respondents are perceived as \ud most honest, compliant, confident, and sincere. Experiment One involved a production task in which \ud subjects adjusted the response latencies of a set of conversational dialogues to yield three \ud durations: an optimal, a too long, and a too short. Correlational analyses on this data were \ud insignificant, but an examination of the mean standard deviations suggested considerable \ud inter-subject agreement on the durational values. Additionally, a\ud regression analysis found that within-speech pauses are significant predictors of the optimal \ud response latency. In Experiment Two ninety-six subjects listened to the adjusted conversational \ud clips from Experiment\ud One and made a series of social judgments about the respondents. Results suggest that an optimal \ud response latency does exist, but such a duration is shorter than hypothesized. These findings are \ud discussed in terms of their ramifications for conversational interaction and communication in\ud general