How can we ensure equal job opportunities? A study on the effect of humorous and non-humorous self-disclosure in reducing accent-based discrimination.
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2023-01-09
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en
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More and more children learn to speak, read, write, and listen to it at an increasingly young age: the English language. In our globalising world, English has become a dominant language for successfully communicating in an international context. However, not everyone sounds the same in English, due to different linguistic backgrounds. Speaker discrimination based on non-standard accentedness is a serious problem in job hiring, since people are being judged based on their non-native accent rather than on their required skills. This study investigated the extent to which a humorous and non-humorous disclosing speaker comment could influence the negative evaluation of slightly and moderately French-accented non-native speakers of English in a hiring context, in terms of perceived comprehensibility, attitudinal evaluations, and hirability. If using a humorous or non-humorous self-disclosing speaker comment could neutralize the negative evaluation of an accented speaker, then a successful and applicable solution would be found for accent-based discrimination. This research investigated this potential solution by setting up a quantitative study: a job-hiring context in which the participants were placed in the role of the employer, presented with an audio recording in which a French speaker pitched her story in slightly or moderately accented non-native English, with either a humorous or non-humorous self-disclosing comment about her accentedness at the beginning of her pitch, or no comment at all. The participants were asked to rate the speaker on a set of dimensions: comprehensibility, attitudinal evaluations, and hirability. Results confirmed a more negative evaluation of the speaker based on comprehensibility and hirability (not on attitudinal evaluations) but did not show an effect of using a humorous or non-humorous self-disclosing comment.
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