What the Voice Reveals: Within- and Between-Category Stereotyping on the Basis of Voice

Abstract

The authors report research that attempts to shift the traditional focus of visual cues to auditory cues as a basis for stereotyping. Moreover, their approach examines whether gender-signaling vocal cues lead not only to between-category but also to within-category gender stereotyping. Study 1 showed that both men and women vary within category in how feminine their voices sound and that perceptions of vocal femininity are highly consensual. Furthermore, the measured acoustic characteristics that differed between gender were also related to perceptions of within-gender femininity. Subsequent studies demonstrated that variability in vocal femininity affects gender stereotyping when the targets are all of the same gender (Study 2) and when the targets are of different genders (Study 3). In the latter case, evidence of both category-based and feature-based stereotyping was found. Mediation analyses showed that the relationship between acoustics and stereotyping was in part due to femininity.

What makes a voice masculine: Physiological and acoustical correlates of women's ratings of men's vocal masculinity

“…At the acoustic level, traits other than F0 and ΔF may also cue for fitness-related features and/or be associated with speaker's perceived masculinity and should therefore be included in further analyses: for example, listeners consistently rate more monotonous voices as less feminine than less monotonous voices (Ko et al, 2006). Finally, adults have been found to spontaneously modify sex-dimorphic acoustic cues (F0 and ΔF) in order to vary the expression of gender and related attributes in line with different roles and social (i.e.…”

Stereotyping Based on Voice in the Presence of Individuating Information: Vocal Femininity Affects Perceived Competence but Not Warmth

“…More importantly for our purposes, we anticipated that vocal femininity would influence judgments (Ko et al, 2006), while gender category itself may not. Our rationale for these predictions comes from recent work suggesting that people in Western societies may have become quite good at controlling the more blatant category-based stereotyping but not the more subtle withincategory feature-based stereotyping, particularly in situations where people may be wary of appearing biased (Blair, Judd, & Chapleau, 2004;Eberhardt et al, 2006;Ko et al, 2008).…”

Sneaking in through the back door: How category-based stereotype suppression leads to rebound in feature-based effects

“…After 5 min, partici-1 The English descriptions were translated into Dutch and can be obtained from the first author. Further details about the descriptions can be found in Ko et al (2006).…”

“…2 For a detailed description of the vocal femininity scaling process, criteria used to select the final subset of voices, and procedure of the probability task see Ko et al (2006). pants were given a second envelope, with a photograph of the second target whose gender was always opposite to the gender of the first target, a new sheet of writing paper, and another 5 min to write.…”

“…Indeed, there has been recent interest in stereotyping based on physical features that vary within social categories, as well as between them (i.e., Afrocentric facial features in the case of race, Blair, Judd, Sadler, & Jenkins, 2002, and vocal features in the case of gender, Ko, Judd, & Blair, 2006). This work has demonstrated what we call feature-based stereotyping, wherein stereotypic inferences are made on the basis of such features even within social categories.…”