Interpersonal Judgments Based on Talkativeness: I Fact or Artifact?

Previous research has demonstrated that participation rates in discussions relate to many asjects of interpersonal perception, but such studies have not determined whether the critical variable is sheer amount of talking or other variables (verbal and/or non-verbal) associated with amount of talk. In this paper, several techniques are developed for separating the purely temporal cues in conversations from the rich set of cues with which they are ordinarily confounded. A series of experiments demonstrates that sheer amount of talk is strongly implicated in the formation of interpersonal impressions.