Texted Word Choices Affect Instructor Perception

Abstract

People make choices about how to represent themselves in conversation, and those choices affect how others judge them. In texted communication, cues to speaker identity and personality rely on word choices. We examined the assumptions people made about conversational partners in academic dialogue snippets when the speakers used negotiation words. Experimental participants generally assumed that the instructors in the dialogues were male, even though the department the participants were in had mostly female instructors. The words used also affected how speakers were viewed, with clearly and obviously leading to more negative perceptions of the speaker. This has implications for online learning, as well as for developing conversational agents. It also has implications for career success for instructors.