Gender stereotypes drive perceptual differences of vocal confidence

Abstract

One's ability to express confidence is critical to achieve one's goals in a social context-such as commanding respect from others, establishing higher social status, and persuading others. How individuals perceive confidence may be shaped by the socio-indexical cues produced by the speaker. In the current production/perception study, we asked four speakers (two cisgender women/men) to answer trivia questions under three speaking contexts: natural, overconfident, and underconfident (i.e., lack of confidence). An evaluation of the speakers' acoustics indicated that the speakers significantly varied their acoustic cues as a function of speaking context and that the women and men had significantly different acoustic cues. The speakers' answers to the trivia questions in the three contexts (natural, overconfident, underconfident) were then presented to listeners (N = 26) in a social judgment task using a computer mouse-tracking paradigm. Listeners were sensitive to the speakers' acoustic modulations of confidence and differentially interpreted these cues based on the perceived gender of the speaker, thereby impacting listeners' cognition and social decision making. We consider, then, how listeners' social judgments about confidence were impacted by gender stereotypes about women and men from social, heuristic-based processes.