How Do You Say ‘Hello’? Personality Impressions from Brief Novel Voices

Abstract

On hearing a novel voice, listeners readily form personality impressions of that speaker. Accurate or not, these impressions are known to affect subsequent interactions; yet the underlying psychological and acoustical bases remain poorly understood. Furthermore, hitherto studies have focussed on extended speech as opposed to analysing the instantaneous impressions we obtain from first experience. In this paper, through a mass online rating experiment, 320 participants rated 64 sub-second vocal utterances of the word ‘hello’ on one of 10 personality traits. We show that: (1) personality judgements of brief utterances from unfamiliar speakers are consistent across listeners; (2) a two-dimensional ‘social voice space’ with axes mapping Valence (Trust, Likeability) and Dominance, each driven by differing combinations of vocal acoustics, adequately summarises ratings in both male and female voices; and (3) a positive combination of Valence and Dominance results in increased perceived male vocal Attractiveness, whereas perceived female vocal Attractiveness is largely controlled by increasing Valence. Results are discussed in relation to the rapid evaluation of personality and, in turn, the intent of others, as being driven by survival mechanisms via approach or avoidance behaviours. These findings provide empirical bases for predicting personality impressions from acoustical analyses of short utterances and for generating desired personality impressions in artificial voices.

Low Vocal Pitch Preference Drives First Impressions Irrespective of Context in Male Voices but Not in Female Voices

“…Similarly, exploring the effect of seeking short-versus long-term relationships, Vukovic et al (2011) showed no significant preference in male pitch when female participants judged the voices for trustworthiness. However, McAleer et al (2014) found that high-pitched male voices were rated as more trustworthy compared with low-pitched voices. Considering trustworthiness in female voices, as is the case with dominance, there is a lack of studies, and again a lack of consistent findings.…”

“…proposed for the importance of the eyes and mouth in establishing personality and emotion in faces (McAleer et al, 2014;Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008).…”

Perceived Masculinity Predicts U.S. Supreme Court Outcomes

“…As noted in the Introduction, these six dimensions were selected based on previous research on listener's perceptual evaluations of linguistic variables [18,29,30]. Each voice clip was played aloud once automatically, but participants were allowed to replay the clip as many times as they chose; in another survey variant, each clip was played only once and participants were unable to replay the clip.…”

“…At the same time, from a behavioral perspective, however, it has been repeatedly shown that the way one speaks reveals a lot about one's personality, level of confidence, as well as ethnicity, socio-economic circumstances, geographic background, sexuality, and ideological stance [8,[16][17][18]. The identification of African American speakers can be made even on the basis of the single word "hello" [11].…”

“…To infer the bias, we need to measure perceptions, which are typically unobserved, and how they relate to outcomes. Here, we focused on six dimensions, selected based on previous research on listener's perceptual evaluations of linguistic variables [18,29,30]. These include masculinity, attractiveness, confidence, intelligence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness.…”