Transcription
The brain evaluates credibility before it evaluates content. It's called the primacy effect. The first signals you send shape the entire judgment, and everything after gets filtered through it.
Status cues come first. Things like appearance, posture, spatial positioning. Then tone and pace are assessed, then timing. And last of all, the content itself, which is maddening because almost everyone focuses on what to say rather than how they're being perceived while they say it.
I've sat in meetings with someone who's actively nervous, says something brilliant, and gets a polite nod. And then someone else says the exact same thing with complete composure, and gets a pat on the back. The message didn't change, but the credibility signals were different.
Nonverbal signals are processed faster and trusted more than verbal content, especially in the first encounters and in high-stakes environments. The patterns in who gets listened to and who gets talked over are completely predictable. It's called expectation states theory. The brain forms rapid expectations about who's competent based on status characteristics, and those expectations determine who gets speaking time and whose contributions carry weight.