Can speaking on the phone make you seem smarter?

If you’re most comfortable reaching out and following up with potential employers via email, you’re hardly alone. But according to new research, you’re also not doing yourself any favors.

One good reason to ditch the computer and pick up the phone: you’ll actually seem smarter.

“The Sound of Intellect,” a new study from Nicholas Epley, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and doctoral candidate Juliana Schroeder, shows that people have more favorable impressions of job candidates when they hear them speak than when they read their written pitches — even if the actual content of the message is identical. So phone-haters, take note: dialing is worth it.

Research has shown over and over again that vocal cues communicate mental state far more accurately than text alone (among other things, this is why no one got your email joke). But Epley and Schroeder reasoned that speech might “actually communicate more clearly that you have a mind, that you’re rational and thoughtful, that you’re alive on the inside,” Epley tells Business Insider. “The closest you’ll ever get to another person’s consciousness,” he says, “is through their mouth.”

To test their theory, the team turned their attention to what they call “a domain where judgements of a person’s mental capacities are both common and critical” — hiring decisions.

In a series of experiments, published in this month’s Journal of Psychological Science, they had University of Chicago MBA students present two-minute elevator pitches in a variety of ways, spoken and written, to both hypothetical employers (as played by random visitors to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry) and real professional recruiters.

Across the board, evaluators — amateurs and pros alike — perceived the candidates who presented spoken pitches as more thoughtful, more intelligent, and more competent than the candidates with written pitches. That was true when the text was an exact transcript of the speech, and it was true when the text was written specifically to be read.

And the inverse, they found, was also true: when Epley and Schroeder had candidates read written pitches aloud, their intelligence ratings went up. In every permutation, vocal presentations trumped written ones.

Don’t email the hiring manager your “thank you” note. Call them.

“It really is something important about the presence of the voice,” Epley explains. “When you strip it away, you lose some of your perception of another person’s mind, and when you add it in, you gain it back.”

That’s because voice — unlike text — contains cues to thinking as it’s happening. “How do I know you’re a thoughtful person?” he asks. “When I hear you explaining something as you’re thinking about it, I can hear you thinking. I can hear the pause in your voice, the fluctuation in tone, the change in the pace and enthusiasm and volume. Even some of the stuttering indicates thought while it’s happening.”

If eyes are the window to the soul, then think of voice as the window to the brain.

One bonus if you prefer to correspond with potential employers sans pants: while vocal presence mattered, physical presence didn’t — you’ll seem smarter on the phone than you will in writing, but a video interview probably won’t do you any extra favors.

The researchers discovered that adding visual cues to audio pitches didn’t change the way the candidates were perceived: if everybody looks basically the same (the MBAs, he says, were all nice and competent-looking people, as is pretty much everyone interviewing for a job), then appearance isn’t a particularly useful evaluation tool.

The point, Epley is clear, isn’t that how you look doesn’t matter — of course it does, he says — but rather there’s something fundamentally special about voice.

Let it be reassurance to us all: you don’t sound as stupid as you think you do. Or at least, it’s better than the alternative.

This article is published in collaboration with Business Insider. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Rachel Sugar is a careers reporter for Business Insider.

Image: Woman talks on the phone as she stands next to a jewellery shop in the trendy nightlife district of Hongdae. REUTERS/Thomas Peter