9.4 “Trust Me, I Know What I’m Talking About”: How to Increase Your Credibility

With all of this talk about credibility as power, you may have been wondering how to increase your own credibility. It’s easy to find lists of ways to enhance credibility, but they often make it look too easy, as though all you have to do is follow six or seven steps and everyone will believe everything you say. Clearly that is not in line with the spirit of this chapter, and implies that a few simple tricks are all that is needed: dress nice, use the right gestures, bingo! While it’s true that credibility is often assessed based on peripheral cues (Chapter 6.5) such as appearance, that’s a fleeting form of credibility. True credibility is hard to gain, easy to lose, and works best when it is established over time. With that said, you can take the factors discussed already and turn them into techniques to build credibility.

1. Demonstrate your knowledge: “I know my stuff”

There are many ways you can signal to your audience that you are knowledgeable on a topic, and they can be divided into subpoints. Think of what a truly knowledgeable person sounds like, and follow their lead:

1a. Show, don’t tell. Depending on the context and the subject matter, you may be able to demonstrate directly that you have expertise in an area by actually doing the thing you claim to be good at doing (i.e., don’t just tell people you can speak Swahili, start speaking it; if you’re in a kitchen, you don’t have to boast about being a good cook if you can make a perfect souffle on the spot). The rest of this advice is about situations where you can’t show, and have to rely on telling instead.

1b. Use the proper terminology. Although this can easily slip into the use of jargon (See Chapter 10.3)or risk alienating your audience by being incomprehensible, using the right terms goes a long way toward telling people you know your subject matter. You can blow it by mispronouncing or misspelling those terms, so you have to be careful, but language may be the best tool to show expertise.

1c. Recite history. If you want to convince people you are a good jazz guitarist but there’s no guitar handy for you to play, start talking about Django Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery and how bebop arose out of swing bands in Kansas City. In contrast, someone who claims to be a jazz guitar maestro but who says “Django who?” is going to lose credibility.

1d. Speak effortlessly. One of the clues that someone knows a topic well is how easily and rapidly they can talk about it. This is not something you can fake, so it certainly doesn’t belong in the category of simple tricks, but if you truly are knowledgeable about something and just don’t know how to show it, learning to relax and “let it flow” when talking about it goes a long way. This is why the delivery modes described in Chapter 14 are connected to credibility: if you can speak about a topic without relying on notes, the audience can see that you know it.

2. Admit your limitations: “But I don’t know everything”

This may seem to contradict the first point, and might go against your instinct to protect your credibility by concealing the limits of your knowledge. But here’s the thing: people who claim to know everything are certainly exaggerating, and true experts don’t make this claim; they are aware of the limits of their knowledge. You hear this all the time when a pundit is invited to talk about something on a TV show and the host asks them to expound on something beyond their expertise: a true expert won’t bite, and will “stay in their lane” instead: “No, I’m an expert on Middle Eastern conflicts and you’re asking about the war in Ukraine — I can’t comment about that.” Showing people that you know where the edge of your “box of knowledge” is sends the message that you really know what’s inside that box.

Moving on to the trustworthiness dimension, the techniques are a little different:

3. Signal your trustworthiness: “Do I look like a liar to you?”

I can’t use the phrase “demonstrate your trustworthiness” in the same way “demonstrate your knowledge,” since trust takes time to build. The best thing you can do is to point to your track record of actions, but what if you don’t have a long track record to point to, or that record has not been spotless? Keep in mind the points that have already been made about who people trust, and the other names for this dimension: motives and bias.

3a. Connect with your audience. As discussed, people tend to trust others with whom they feel a sense of connection or similarity, which is why the border guard lets Llewellyn across in No Country For Old Men (See Chapter 6.5). The guard is the one to ask Llewellyn if he was in the military, but Llewellyn could have gotten a jump on it by being the first to point out that connection. Good sales people are always looking for ways to connect with customers (“I see you’re wearing a Maroon 5 T-shirt: I love that band!”), and politicians emphasize any similarity they can find with their audience (“I grew up poor myself”).

3b. Address motive issues. Sometimes audiences will suspect that someone has an ulterior motive or hidden agenda, such as a salesperson who tries to sell them a more expensive car because they’ll get a bigger commission. What should you do if someone suspects you in this way? You could try to dismiss their concern, but it seems wiser to tackle it head on, either by explaining why it’s not an issue (“I get paid a flat salary, not a commission”) or acknowledging it up front and moving on to other reasons the more expensive car is better. The thing I wouldn’t recommend is letting the audience wonder about it on their own without addressing it.

3c. Acknowledge other points of view. This is a particular philosophy that others may disagree with, but it grows out of the Paradox of Passion and the difficulty of maintaining neutrality. The problem with the Paradox of Passion is not just that the expert has strong feelings; it’s that those strong feelings blind them to other points of view. To counteract this, even small acknowledgements of the validity of other points of view can have a powerful effect. I ended the discussion of the paradox with four scenarios where it can be an issue, including a politician responding to a State of the Union speech and a married partner testifying on behalf of their spouse. Imagine how much difference it would make if the opposing politician mixed in a few acknowledgements of good points the president made among all the criticisms, or the spouse admitted that their partner is not a saint. Is doing so a sign of weakness or uncertainty, or a sign of strength and open-mindedness? Experts may disagree, but I’m in the second camp.

Other guidelines for increasing your credibility can be derived from the concept that credibility can transfer from one party to another:

4. Cite Your Source: “This isn’t about me”

One lesson from the transfer concept is that you have a choice about how much your own credibility is an issue: you can do things that make it a central one, or you can lighten the load on you by citing other sources. This is why teachers require bibliographies and citations in term papers: you don’t want to imply “I (an undergraduate student) know everything about spun glass air filters,” but want to say “Here’s what the experts on spun glass air filters say.” It’s also about giving credit where credit is due, which is a good ethical habit. Outside the academic realm, hyperlinks serve the same purpose: they tell the world “It’s not just me who is making this claim.”

5. Outsource Your Bragging

One general hazard of credibility is boasting: explicitly telling people you are an amazing person, which puts many people off and sets the expectations high. Yet there are times when you need to tell people about your accomplishments: in order to get promoted at work, you will probably have to convince your bosses you’ve done a good job; a restaurant will get more customers if the public knows it’s the best sushi place in town; and if you’re on the dating circuit you need to get the word out that you’re a “catch.” The solution is obvious: get others to “talk you up,” either in spoken or written form. It works best when they use stories and nouns, not adjectives: i.e., if they tell stories about your actual accomplishments and deeds instead of just describing in general terms what a great person you are. This technique can backfire if it’s too obvious, and there may be questions about solicitation (did you get those people to say those nice things by offering an incentive or trading favors?), but in general it’s one of the most tried and true methods to increase credibility.

6. Message credibility: “I told you once i told you a milion times don’t exagerate”

This phrase is meant to illustrate that when it comes to making the message itself credible, one important principle is to avoid pitfalls. Those include:

Spelling mistakes, poor grammar, punctuation errors, and missing words. With the increase of hasty writing in discussion boards, these small errors seem to be becoming more common and therefore more accepted, but they still send the underlying message that the author couldn’t be bothered to take a minute to check their message before posting it. Sloppiness in writing can be a signal of sloppiness in factual accuracy, which is why a single typo in a resume can be fatal. And on a basic courtesy level, it takes the challenge of achieving mutual understanding (see the Lego model discussion in Chapter 1) and pushes work from the author to the reader. This is especially true for missing words where the has to figure out word is missing from the.

Exaggeration, overstatement, and overconfidence. Speaking as an audience member, the quickest way to get me to discount your message is to guarantee with 100% confidence that it is always true, your medicine cures everything, and your political plans will fix all problems overnight. See the discussion of the Toulmin model in Chapter 7, particularly the importance of qualifiers.

Inappropriate style. One of the intended take-aways from Chapter 10 is that matching your language style to the audience and situation is a key to good communication. Swearing and using a lot of slang among your friends is fine, but don’t do it in a job interview. On the other hand, it’s probably off-putting to use language that’s too proper and formal when you’re skateboarding with friends.

Poor organization. People may not notice if your message is well-organized and flows logically, but they will definitely notice the opposite: a message that is disorganized and “all over the place” will undermine your credibility.

Will following all of this advice guarantee that people take you seriously and believe what you say? Consider this exercise: before I give a lecture on credibility, I sometimes ask my students to come to class with the name of a highly credible public figure. I give them a week to think about it. Many come back with the name of someone who is long dead (Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Albert Einstein) or someone in their personal life who doesn’t qualify as a “public figure,” or they just draw a blank. Some name a celebrity or politician that they personally admire, but the phrase “highly credible” implies that everyone admires the person in the same way and there aren’t a lot of people who attack or question their credibility. Some name a minor celebrity who no one else in the room has heard of.

Why is this such a difficult assignment? Perhaps because we have learned more about tearing down credibility than building it up, perhaps because we live in the information age where there is always some “dirt” somewhere that a motivated person can discover and exploit, or perhaps it’s because the public sphere has become so divided that one community’s hero is automatically another community’s villain. At any rate, the lesson about credibility is that there is no magic wand that will make everyone believe everything you say. The most important thing is to actually be knowledgeable, trustworthy, and unbiased, but you still have to let the world know that you are those things. Credibility, then is something that must be communicated to others somehow.

My answer to the assignment, by the way, is Fred Rogers. He was the host of the PBS children’s show Mr. Rogers, and his testimony to Congress in 1969 has been called one of the most effective speeches ever given (see Chapter 13). He’s been dead since 2003, so he doesn’t really qualify as a public figure anymore, some people found him a bit creepy, and there have always been wild rumors floating around about him… but in the two decades since his passing, no one has been able to find any credible evidence that he was not “the real deal.”