People listen to speeches with their eyes.
Now, that sounds strange at first. Here comes the science: in the first five seconds, with the sound off, you can predict how an audience will like a speaker. Five seconds. No sound.
They've done this with professors, who get rated by students. They taped every lecture, watched them all and came up with a formula to predict how that professor would get rated by students. Deadly accurate.
The researchers didn't want to watch every lecture ever again, in their natural lives, so they cut it down to the first month's lectures, then the first lecture, then the first ten minutes of the first lecture -- and finally the first five seconds. And it was still accurate.
Different researchers have done taped job interviews and predicting who'd get hired by looking at the first five seconds.
In politics, the rule that people listen with their eyes got driven home by the Kennedy-Nixon debate, the first presidential debate to get televised. Those listening on the radio thought Nixon won. Those watching moving pictures while listening to the same words thought Kennedy won.
If you showed the first five seconds of that debate to people who didn't know who Kennedy and Nixon were, and turned the sound, you'd get the same result.
What's the secret to the critical first five seconds, when an audience makes their first impression of you?
There are clues in different studies. In America, researchers had voters look at the photos of people running for Congress for a few seconds, then rate them on smarts, likeability, attractiveness and competence.
They thought attractiveness would matter. It didn't.
They thought race would matter, and sex, and age. No.
Competence was king.
The candidate who voters thought looked more competent won more than 70 percent of the time, which is insane, because incumbent members of Congress get re-elected about 90 percent or 95 percent, depending on the year. Either way, there's no way you'd expect to glance at two mug shots and be able to predict who'd win.
But you can.
In Europe, they did this with five-year-old kids and photos of people running for the EU's parliament. The five-year-olds predicted who would win.
This is not function of serious, grown-up thought and deliberation. It's a quick, instinctual reaction, and it makes sense.
Say it's 500 years ago and your village is under attack. You've got five seconds to pick a leader. You're not picking the prettiest girl in town, a slick-talking young man or a nerdy professor type. You're looking for a Clint Eastwood, somebody who may not be handsome, but looks tough and smart. Somebody who knows what they're doing. You're looking for competent.