Foreign accents make people suspicious

LONDON - Researchers believe people are suspicious of foreigners when they speak with a different accent.

Why? Truthfulness is associated with the ease of understanding a person, and foreign accents make understanding more difficult.

Listeners are less willing to believe someone with a non-native accent. Their prejudice is more if the accent becomes thicker, communication experts said.

The implications of the research, by the University of Chicago, could be wide-ranging as millions move around the world and talk in languages other than their mother tongue, the Telegraph reported Friday.

Boaz Keysar, psychology professor at the University of Chicago, said: “The accent makes it harder for people to understand what the non-native speaker is saying. They misattribute the difficulty of understanding the speech to the truthfulness of the statements.”

Lesley Prince, a social psychologist from Birmingham, described it as “inevitable” that accent would be among the factors that people use to judge each other when communicating, says the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

“People will be suspicious of what they don’t know. If you have difficulty understanding, then that creates uncertainty in the mind. Uncertainty leads to lack of trust,” Prince said.