Similarity is more important than expertise

Abstract

In a balanced between-participants experiment (N = 96) American and Swedish participants listened to tourist information on a website about an American or Swedish city presented in English with either an American or Swedish accent and evaluated the speakers' knowledge of the topic, the voice characteristics, and the information characteristics. Users preferred accents similar to their own. Similarity-attraction effects were so powerful that same-accents speakers were viewed as being more knowledgeable than different-accent speakers even when the information would be much better-known by the opposite-accent speaker. Implications for similarity-attraction overwhelming expertise are discussed.

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