And what they say can guide your attributions and shape how you feel and act. Do they not care? Are they disorganized? Do they have enough staff? Or perhaps the system is working perfectly well and they are simply helping urgent life-threatening conditions first. The medical team has the knowledge, tools and medications to treat your cut and send you home on a path of healing. You only need a few minutes of medical attention. Imagine spending a few hours in the waiting room of a hospital’s emergency room. Power may be reflected by financial or nonfinancial resources. They may be constrained at the moment, for one reason or another. But just because the power holder is not helping at the moment, does not mean they will not help in the future. There are many situations where those who have power are not able to immediately help those in need of resources. How might this play out outside the research setting? In these situations, given the situational constraint on behavior, words speak louder than actions. When the system prevents the high power player from contributing behaviorally, yet enables communication, we find that words mitigate the impact of selfish behavior: Despite the selfish behavior of those with power, low power members contribute to the group. Our research focuses on situations where people’s behavior is constrained through no fault of their own, and compares when they can or cannot speak. However, this interpretation of inconsistency, between what one says and what one does, is based on a belief that there is freedom of choice with respect to one’s words and one’s actions.
In such situations, we discount words as “lip service.” We are all too familiar with empty promises, and assume we can count only on people who deliver through behavioral action. This is based on an assumption that the behavior more accurately reflects the person’s motivations and goals.
What surprised or jumped out the most from the study?Īccording to conventional wisdom, when a person says one thing but does another, more weight should be given to the action. Your research turns some conventional wisdom on its head, namely that actions speak louder than words. Kopelman discusses this research, particularly what it reveals about actions and words of people in positions of power, and which speaks louder. The study focused on how low-power group members responded to moves of the person in high power.
Kopelman’s co-authors in the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, are Jennifer Dannals of Dartmouth College, Eliran Halali of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and Nir Halevy of Stanford University. “Interestingly, our research leads us to question assumptions behind sayings, such as ‘actions speak louder than words,'” said Shirli Kopelman, co-author of the study and a leading researcher, expert and educator in the field of negotiations at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
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