Question

Short segments of surgeon-patient conversations were filtered to make the speech unintelligible while preserving its intonation, pitch, and rhythm. Listeners' ability to use this limited information to accurately assess which surgeons had been sued illustrated the potency of the surgeons'?

1) attributional style
2) self-esteem
3) expressive style
4) self-serving bias

Answer 1

Listeners' assessments of which surgeons had been sued based on the nonverbal elements of speech relate to the surgeons' expressive style, not to self-serving bias, attributional style, or self-esteem.

Step-by-step explanation:

The ability of listeners to accurately assess which surgeons had been sued based on filtered conversations that maintained intonation, pitch, and rhythm without actual comprehensible speech, points to the potency of surgeons' expressive style.

This scenario does not illustrate self-serving bias, as self-serving bias is the tendency to explain our successes through internal attributions and our failures through external ones, which is more related to self-assessment rather than expression style.

The expressive style, by contrast, is how an individual conveys nonverbal cues such as tone and rhythm, which evidently can transmit significant information leading to assessments of professional behavior.