A microphone check might be a pivotal task ahead of a videoconference call — whether for a job interview, a business meeting or a chat with a prospective romantic partner.
A series of lab experiments has revealed that microphone-induced voice distortion can lower people’s judgements about a speaker’s intelligence, credibility, hireability and romantic desirability.
Psychologist Brian Scholl at Yale University in the US and his colleagues have found that voices rendered tinny — metallic, thin or weak — during videoconference calls could become potential sources of unintentional bias and discrimination.
“Every experiment showed that a tinny or hollow sound associated with a poor-quality microphone negatively affects people’s impressions of a speaker — independent of the message conveyed,” said Scholl, professor of psychology and director of the perception and cognition lab at Yale.
Multiple earlier studies have established that voice quality can influence impressions that people form about speakers, with research suggesting that such impressions can emerge within 400 milliseconds to 30 seconds of hearing a voice. A 2021 research review of 11 previous studies, collectively involving 2,217 participants, had concluded that people with lower-pitched voices tend to be more dominant, more outgoing and more open to casual relationships.
The Yale study, the first to directly explore the impact of microphone quality on people’s judgements, has suggested that the negative impressions resulting from voice distortions could impact decisions across a broad range of social contexts.
“Given how familiar such auditory distortions are in videoconferencing, we were surprised that they affected so many different kinds of social judgements about the speakers,” Robert Walter-Terrill, a research scholar at Yale and the study’s first author, told The Telegraph.
Walter said the effects they observed “could really matter”, particularly in scenarios where even minordecision-making biases could have significant consequences, for example, when applying for a highly competitive jobor in high-stakes businessnegotiations.
The researchers designed experiments to explore whether superficial and external characteristics of speech — independent of the actual message — would impact higher-level social judgements. Listeners heard a voice recording and made a single judgement about the speaker.
In one experiment, the listeners were asked to imagine they had to make a hiring decision for a senior sales manager’s position and heard a purported “personal statement” recorded in a male voice from a potential job applicant. They had to rate how likely they would be to hire the person on a scale of “very unlikely” to “very likely”.
In a second experiment, another group of listeners was asked to imagine they were single and looking for a date on an online dating site and heard a statement of interest recorded in a female voice.
They had to rate how likely they would be to go on adate with this person on a scale of “very unlikely” to “very likely”.
In both these experiments, the listeners who heard distorted recordings — mimicking a poor-quality microphone — indicated that they were less likely to hire the person or go on a date with the speaker compared to those who heard the clear recordings.
Two other experiments showed that voice distortions also lowered perceptions about intelligence and credibility.
The researchers have described the effects of the microphone-induced voice distortions on people’s judgements as “inappropriateand irrational” because the distortions emerged from technology.
“It is reasonable to make judgements on the basis of how people sound — for instance, a large man shouldn’t be expected to sound like a baby or vice versa,” said Walter-Tirrell. “But only technology can make the voice sound tinny — so such sounds cannot represent any aspect of speakers themselves.”
The researchers say speakers on a videoconference may be unaware of the voice distortion. “On a call with other people, you may be the only one who doesn’t know how you sound to the others,” Walter-Tirrell said. “You may hear yourself as rich and resonant, while everyone else hears a tint voice.”