Judgements of a speaker's personality are correlated across differing content and stimulus type

Abstract

It has previously been shown that first impressions of a speaker's personality, whether accurate or not, can be judged from short utterances of vowels and greetings, as well as from prolonged sentences and readings of complex paragraphs. From these studies, it is established that listeners' judgements are highly consistent with one another, suggesting that different people judge personality traits in a similar fashion, with three key personality traits being related to measures of valence (associated with trustworthiness), dominance, and attractiveness. Yet, particularly in voice perception, limited research has established the reliability of such personality judgements across stimulus types of varying lengths. Here we investigate whether first impressions of trustworthiness, dominance, and attractiveness of novel speakers are related when a judgement is made on hearing both one word and one sentence from the same speaker. Secondly, we test whether what is said, thus adjusting content, influences the stability of personality ratings. 60 Scottish voices (30 females) were recorded reading two texts: one of ambiguous content and one with socially-relevant content. One word (~500 ms) and one sentence (~3000 ms) were extracted from each recording for each speaker. 181 participants (138 females) rated either male or female voices across both content conditions (ambiguous, socially-relevant) and both stimulus types (word, sentence) for one of the three personality traits (trustworthiness, dominance, attractiveness). Pearson correlations showed personality ratings between words and sentences were strongly correlated, with no significant influence of content. In short, when establishing an impression of a novel speaker, judgments of three key personality traits are highly related whether you hear one word or one sentence, irrespective of what they are saying. This finding is consistent with initial personality judgments serving as elucidators of approach or avoidance behaviour, without modulation by time or content. All data and sounds are available on OSF (osf.io/s3cxy).

Fig 1

Scatterplot of VAS ratings for words versus sentences in female and male voices for trustworthiness (top), dominance (middle), and attractiveness (bottom panel). Female Voices (left) and regression slope (Orange); Male Voices (right) and regression slope (Green); each dot represents a single voice; grey line represents r = 1.

Fig 2

Scatterplots of VAS ratings for words versus sentences by content, in female (top) and male voices (bottom panels) for trustworthiness (left), dominance (middle), and attractiveness (right panel). Content-ambiguous (black dashed regression slope; open triangles represent individual voices) versus Content-relevant (blue solid regression slope; closed circles represent individual voices); grey line represents r = 1.

Fig 3

Scatterplot of VAS ratings for content-relevant versus content-ambiguous in female and male voices for trustworthiness (top), dominance (middle) and attractiveness (bottom panel). Female Voices (left) and regression slope (Orange); Male Voices (right) and regression slope (Green); each dot represents a single voice; grey line represents r = 1.

Fig 4

Scatterplots of VAS ratings for content-relevant versus content-ambiguous by stimulus type (word vs. sentence), in female (top) and male voices (bottom panels) for trustworthiness (left), dominance (middle), and attractiveness (right panel). Sentences (black dashed regression slope; open triangles represent individual voices) versus Words (blue solid regression slope; closed circles represent individual voices); grey line represents r = 1.