From job interviews to dating, we subconsciously judge one another based on sound quality when we interact digitally
Like hundreds of millions of others around the world, Brian Scholl, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at Yale University, spent much of the COVID pandemic on Zoom. But during one digital faculty meeting, he found himself reacting unexpectedly to two colleagues. One was a close collaborator with whom Scholl usually saw eye-to-eye, while the other was someone he tended to have differing opinions from. On that particular day, though, he found himself siding with the latter colleague. “Everything he said was so rich and resonant,” Scholl recalls.
As he reflected afterwards, Scholl realized that there was a key underlying difference between the two men’s messaging: the colleague whom Scholl normally agreed with had been using a junky built-in microphone on an old laptop, whereas the one with whom he typically disagreed had called in from a professional-grade home-recording studio. Scholl began to suspect that it was the quality of their sound, rather than the content of their arguments, that had swayed his judgment.
New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggests his hunch was correct. In a series of experiments, Scholl and his colleagues found that poor audio quality consistently caused listeners to negatively judge speakers in a variety of contexts—even if the message itself was exactly the same.
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“When chatting on Zoom, everyone is familiar with how they look, but we don’t typically take into account how we sound to other people,” Scholl says. “It turns out this can really drive people’s impressions of how intelligent you are, how credible you are and how datable and hirable you are.”
Our brain evolved to make intuitive judgments about people not solely on the basis of what they say but also according to how they sound. Ample research has shown that factors such as how confident a person sounds or whether they have an accent influence how others perceive them. Scholl wanted to see if the same pattern would hold when the only difference was technological distortion.
Scholl, Robert Walter-Terrill and Joan Danielle Ongchoco, both then graduate students at Yale, created audio recordings in which a human man or woman or a computerized male or female voice read one of three scripts. Each script dealt with a different topic: the readers posed as a job applicant, a potential romantic partner and someone describing a car accident. Some of the recordings were clear, whereas others were artificially manipulated to sound tinny. “We tried to use a manipulation that’s relevant to daily life,” Scholl says. “If you spend time on Zoom, you probably know tons of people who sound like this.”
The researchers recruited more than 5,100 people online and had each participant listen to one script and then answer simple questions about their judgment of the speaker on a continuous scale. The team ensured that the participants actually understood what they had heard by asking some of them to transcribe the recording they heard after they answered the questions.
Across all three scripts, and for both human and computerized voices, participants consistently rated the tinny voices as less hirable, datable, credible and intelligent. The findings speak to the “deep power of perception,” Scholl says, and its ability to make us behave irrationally. “Everybody knows that this kind of auditory manipulation does not reflect on the person themselves,” he says. “But our perception is operating, in some ways, autonomously from higher-level thought.”
Nadine Lavan, a psychologist at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved in the research, says the findings are somewhat expected based on what researchers already knew about how we evaluate other people. “But a lack of surprise doesn’t mean the results are not important or interesting,” she says.
The study raises questions, she continues, about how much of an effect microphone quality may or may not have in real-world settings. Job applicants, for example “don’t tend to read out their applications; they tend to give more spontaneous answers,” Lavan says. “Also, abstract ratings of credibility and of being hirable are informative, but real-life hiring decisions tend to include higher stakes and much more complex trading off of different factors.”
Assuming the findings do hold in the real world to some extent, Scholl says the takeaway lesson is clear: “You should really find out how you sound to other people online. And if you don’t sound good, take some remediable action,” he says.
This was the case for Scholl’s tinny-sounding colleague, he adds, who eventually upgraded to a better microphone.