Superficial auditory (dis)fluency biases higher-level social judgment

When talking to other people, we naturally form impressions based not only on what they say but also on how they say it—e.g., how confident they sound. In modern life, however, the sounds of voices are often determined not only by intrinsic qualities (such as vocal anatomy) but also by extrinsic properties (such as videoconferencing microphone quality). Here, we show that such superficial auditory properties can have surprisingly deep consequences for higher-level social judgments. Listeners heard short narrated passages (e.g., from job application essays) and then made various judgments about the speakers. Critically, the recordings were modified to simulate different microphone qualities, while carefully equating listeners’ comprehension of the words. Though the manipulations carried no implications about the speakers themselves, common disfluent auditory signals (as in “tinny” speech) led to decreased judgments of intelligence, hireability, credibility, and romantic desirability. These effects were robust across speaker gender and accent, and they occurred for both human and clearly artificial (computer-synthesized) speech. Thus, just as judgments from written text are influenced by factors such as font fluency, judgments from speech are not only based on its content but also biased by the superficial vehicle through which it is delivered. Such effects may become more relevant as daily communication via videoconferencing becomes increasingly widespread.