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I'd love to see the study broken out by people who are listening for confidence vs. content . I recall showing my mom Paul Buchheit's Startup School 08 talk: this video I thought it was great, and I remember listening very intently to parse out exactly what he was saying and figure out what he was saying. I showed it to my mom, and her first reaction was "Why are you listening to him? He seems kinda nebbishy." Notice how many pauses, umms, y'knows, and other filler words are in that speech. I ignored them because I already knew what he had accomplished; my assumption was that he knew what he was talking about, and so I should pay close attention. My mom, who knows nothing about tech and didn't start using GMail until 2012, came away with the impression that he was unconfident, rambling, and didn't really know what he was talking about. The advice to eliminate filler words may be a consequence of a world where people make snap judgments about the credibility of a person in seconds, and usually are not qualified to judge the content of the speech at all. Notice how the article says that this advice first caught on in the 20th century, right as mass communication and soundbite messages caught on. The studies they cite, however, all featured listeners from the same field as the speaker who already cared about the content.
