To win trust and praise, fix your microphone
From job interviews to dating, we potentially judge each other based on sound quality when interacting digitally.
Yale psychologist and cognitive scientist Brian Scholl, like hundreds of millions of other millions around the world, spent much of the Covid pandemic on Zoom. However, at one digital faculty meeting, he found himself reacting unexpectedly to two colleagues. One was a close collaborator who saw shawls normally eye-opening, and the other was someone who tended to have different opinions. However, on that particular day he found himself dressed up with his latter colleague. “Everything he said was so rich and resonant,” recalls Shoal.
Then, as he reflected, Shoal realized there was an important fundamental difference in the messages of the two men. A colleague that Shoal normally agreed to, used junk-built-in microphones on his old laptop, but those he typically opposed called out from a professional-grade home recording studio. Scholl began to doubt that it was the quality of their sound, not the content of their arguments that shook his judgment.
New research It is published on Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences It suggests that his foreshadowing was correct. In a series of experiments, Scholl and his colleagues found that poor sound quality led listeners to consistently judge speakers negatively in different contexts, even if the messages themselves were exactly the same.
Supporting science journalism
If you enjoy this article, consider supporting award-winning journalism. Subscribe. Purchase a subscription helps ensure a future of impactful stories about discoveries and ideas that will shape our world today.
“When we chat on Zoom, everyone is familiar with their appearance, but we usually don’t consider how it sounds to others,” says Shoal. “This shows that it can really drive people’s impressions of how intelligent you are, how reliable you are, and how data-envious you are.”
Our brains have evolved to make intuitive judgments about people, not just what they say, but how they sound. Abundant research has shown factors such as Confidence Can people hear They have an accent It affects how others perceive them. The shawl wanted to see if the same pattern was retained when the only difference was technical distortion.
Shoal, Robert Walter Terrill and Joan Daniel Onscoco are both graduate students at Yale and have produced audio recordings in which human or female or computer male or female voices read one of three scripts. Each script covered a different topic. Readers pretended to be job seekers, potential romantic partners, and someone explaining a car accident. Some of the recordings were clear, but the other recordings were artificially manipulated to produce the sound. “We tried to use operations related to everyday life,” says Scholl. “If you’re spending your time on Zoom, you know there are a lot of people who sound like this.”
The researchers recruited over 5,100 people online, listened to one script for each participant and answered simple questions about speaker judgment on a continuous scale. The team ensured that participants understood what they had actually heard by asking participants to transcribe the recordings they heard after answering the questions.
Throughout all three scripts and in both human and computer voices, participants consistently rated Tinny Voices as less hi-sex, dataable, reliable, and intelligent. The findings talk about the “deep power of perception” and the ability to make us behave irrationally. “Everyone knows that this type of auditory manipulation doesn’t reflect a person themselves,” he says. “But our perceptions work in a way autonomously from a high level of thinking.”
Nadine Lavan, a psychologist at Queen Mary University in London, says he was not involved in the study, but the findings say there is some expectation based on what researchers already know about how to evaluate others. “But the lack of surprise doesn’t mean that the outcome is neither important nor interesting,” she says.
This study raises questions about how effective microphone quality may or may not have in real-world settings. For example, job seekers “do not tend to read applications. They tend to give more voluntary answers,” says Lavan. “Also, the abstract assessment of reliability and high-accessibility is beneficial, but actual employment decisions tend to involve higher interests and more complex factors trading.”
Assuming that the findings are held to some extent in the real world, Shoal says takeout lessons are clear.
This was the case with a colleague at Scholl’s Tiny Sound, he adds. He eventually upgraded to a better microphone.
