If your mic sucks on a conference call then everyone judges you. In our deepest hearts we all know this is true but now it’s confirmed by science. A new study from Yale looked at people’s perception of a speaker based on how their mic makes them sound. The results won’t shock you. People with bad audio setups are less likely to get a job, land a date, or be seen as credible.
According to a blogpost about the study, lead author Brian Scholl got the idea for the study during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Scholl is a professor of psychology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Wu Tsai Institute and was on a lot of conference calls while everyone was still figuring out their setups and learning how to use Zoom.
During one meeting, Scholl was on a call with a colleague who had an excellent sound setup and another who was talking through a tinny laptop mic. Scholl realized he thought his colleague on the better mic was making better points and that he didn’t like what his colleague on the awful laptop mic had to say.
So he decided to study the bias. The study, titled Superficial auditory (dis)fluency biases higher-level social judgment, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The researchers ran six different experiments. Participants would listen to a short speech and make judgments about the speaker based on what they’d heard. In each experiment, people would hear the same speech through two different styles of mics: one was resonant and clear and the other was tinny and awful. Scientists were careful to make sure the distortion didn’t cover up the message and each listener would have to transcribe the message after to make sure they understood.
The scientists varied the gender and accent (it was either British or American) across the experiments. In one experiment, listeners had to make a hiring decision after hearing the voices pitch themselves for the job. In another, people listened to a dating profile. “In one focused on credibility, participants listened to a computerized female voice with a British accent deny culpability for a traffic accident,” the blogpost explained.
The results were clear: the voices that sounded like they came through a bad mic got hired less, dated less, and believed less. Those perceptions cut across gender and accent. “As judgments from text are influenced by factors such as font fluency, judgments from speech are not only based on its content but also biased by the superficial vehicle through which it is delivered,” the paper said. “Such effects may become more relevant as daily communication via videoconferencing becomes increasingly widespread.”
“Every experiment we conducted showed that a familiar tinny or hollow sound associated with a poor-quality microphone negatively affects people’s impressions of a speaker— independent of the message conveyed,” Scholl said in the Yale blogpost. “This is both fascinating and concerning, especially when the sound of your voice is determined not just by your vocal anatomy, but also by the technology you’re using.”
Scholl also noted how hard a problem this was to catch and correct. It’s easy to see what you look like in a Zoom call, but most people aren’t listening to how they sound when they talk on a mic. “On a call with dozens of people, you may be the only one who doesn’t know how you sound to everyone else: you may hear yourself as rich and resonant, while everyone else hears a tinny voice,” he said.
