Attraction: it's in the voice

It takes less than a second to form an impression of someone’s personality based solely on their voice. That’s the conclusion of researchers at the University of Glasgow, Scotland (New Scientist, March 14, 2014).

Researchers at UG recorded 64 people as they read a passage, and extracted the word ‘hello’ as a separate voice file. They asked 320 people to rate the voices (saying hello) on a scale of 1 to 9 for one of ten perceived personality traits, such as trustworthiness, dominance, and attractiveness.

The first surprise was how similar people’s ratings were. The researchers scaled the responses for similarity or difference of opinion about the personality traits they gave to each of the 64 hellos. If 0 represented no agreement and 10 represented total agreement, the 320 respondents who judged the 64 voices scored an average of 0.92 for all 10 traits. That’s 92% agreement levels, meaning that most people agreed very closely with each other on the personality trait assigned to each hello. Researchers were not clear why snap judgements are almost universal, but what was apparent was that people did make rapid judgements instead of taking their time. The head researcher, Phil McAleer said it may be related to an innate evolutionary ‘approach/avoidance’ technique – people want to quickly know whether to approach someone or avoid them. However, this would appear to be a visual technique rather than an aural one.

The hello voice clips were just 390 milliseconds long. Therefore the respondents made a judgement about the personality of the voice with only one word. Researchers said respondents used factors such as pitch, whether it is monotone or animated, whether it trails off or rises at the end of a word, the speed, and the depth or tone. The subtle signals that the voice can portray include gender, age, body strength, and now, it seems, personality.

The researchers did indicate that some aspects of a person’s voice can be changed with speech therapy or lessons, although not all. For example, the researchers noted that the shape of the vocal tract influenced the trait of dominance.

Applied use of this knowledge could influence artificial voices for people with a medical condition or to create personable voices for robots, answering machines, and audio GPS systems (satnavs).

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0090779