Want to convince someone to do something? A new University of Michigan study has some intriguing insights drawn from how we speak.

The study, presented May 14 at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, examines how various speech characteristics influence people's decisions to participate in telephone surveys. But its findings have implications for many other situations, from closing sales to swaying voters and getting stubborn spouses to see things your way.

"Interviewers who spoke moderately fast, at a rate of about 3.5 words per second, were much more successful at getting people to agree than either interviewers who talked very fast or very slowly," said Jose Benki, a research investigator at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

For the study, Benki and colleagues used recordings of 1,380 introductory calls made by 100 male and female telephone interviewers at the U-M ISR. They analyzed the interviewers' speech rates, fluency, and pitch, and correlated those variables with their success in convincing people to participate in the survey.

來自Michigan 大學的研究人員發現：當你想說服某人時，說的什么并不重要，怎么說才重要。如果你想說服某人（例如面試），那么最好按照下面的做法，即便撒謊也沒關系。

研究人員Benki 找來100個男女，錄了1380段不同的自我介紹，然后把這些介紹拿去調查面試，看看那種介紹更容易說服人。結果發現，面試的時候每秒鐘說3.5個單詞，每隔4-5分鐘停頓一下，更容易讓你得到這份工作。

因為這個頻率會讓你顯得有生氣，并且不像是在背臺詞。據說不那么流利的對話，比特別流暢的對話更容易收到面試官青睞。