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
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