Implicit effects of speaker accents and vocally-expressed confidence on decisions to trust.

Abstract

People often evaluate speakers with nonstandard accents as being less competent or trustworthy, which is often attributed to in-group favoritism. However, speakers can also modulate social impressions in the listener through their vocal expression (e.g., by speaking in a confident vs. a doubtful tone of voice). Here, we addressed how both accents and vocally-expressed confidence affect social outcomes in an interaction setting using the Trust Game, which operationalizes interpersonal trust using a monetary exchange situation. In a first study, 30 English Canadians interacted with partners speaking English with a Canadian, Australian, or foreign (French) accent. Speakers with each accent vocally expressed themselves in different ways (confident, doubtful, or neutral voice). Results show that trust decisions were significantly modulated by a speaker's accent (fewer tokens were given to foreign-accented speakers) and by vocally-expressed confidence (less tokens were given to doubtful-sounding speakers). Using the same paradigm, a second study then tested whether manipulating the social identity of the speaker-listener led to similar trust decisions in participants who spoke English as a foreign language (EFL; 60 native speakers of French or Spanish). Again, EFL participants trusted partners who spoke in a doubtful manner and those with a foreign accent less, regardless of the participants' linguistic background. Taken together, results suggest that in social-interactive settings, listeners implicitly use different sources of vocal cues to derive social impressions and to guide trust-related decisions, effects not solely driven by shared group membership. The influence of voice information on trust decisions was very similar for native and nonnative listeners.

Comment: The Next Frontier: Prosody Research Gets Interpersonal

“…So far, empirical work suggests that three-step models can be usefully applied to situations in which the listener forms a mental representation of speaker (un)certainty or (un)commitment in the context of particular speech acts, such as statements of fact, opinion, or intentions. This research creates a starting point for broader work that examines how vocal expressions of confidence contribute to social cognitive processes related to competence, persuasion, and trust (e.g., Caballero & Pell, 2020; McAleer et al, 2014; van Zant & Berger, 2019), and which explore their neural underpinnings (e.g., Hellbrand & Sammler, 2018). Examining other communicative situations in which vocally expressed confidence is used as a pragmatic device—for example, in persuasive communication and marketing, to convince people of untruths in the political arena, or using cues of uncertainty solely to convey politeness, etc.—is an especially promising research area to explore further.…”

“…Vocally expressed confidence is robustly detected at the stage of salience detection, differentiating the P200 response to confident versus doubtful voices. Similar to when vocal emotion expressions are analyzed, the directionality of P200 effects depends on the listener's task focus (Paulmann et al, 2013); for example, while highly confident vocal expressions are more salient in certain contexts (Jiang & Pell, 2015), vocal cues marking the speaker's hesitation are more salient (increased P200 amplitude) when listeners must decide whether or not to trust the speaker (Jiang et al, 2020; see also Caballero & Pell, 2020). Following initial semantic differentiation of the stimulus (confident vs. doubtful), fine-tuning of a mental representation of the speaker's vocal confidence level appears to build up in the 300-700 ms time window, ensuring that a finer gradient of meaning is achieved ("she seems just slightly uncommitted to this idea").…”

Accent Speaks Louder than Ability: Elucidating the Effect of Nonnative Accent on Trust

“…Given that trust is a fundamental element of social interaction (Mayer et al, 1995), if nonnative accents unfairly influence people’s trust perceptions, this likely hurts NNESs’ career opportunities and work relationships substantially. Although past primary studies have examined the relation between nonnative accent and trust (e.g., Caballero & Pell, 2020; Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010), they have defined trust as a generic concept. Yet, trustworthiness (but not trust) embodies three different attributed characteristics of the trustee, including ability —an individual’s perceptions based on domain-specific judgments of the trustee’s competence, benevolence —an individual’s perceptions of a trustee’s goodwill and caring, and integrity —whether the trustee will choose to act ethically and to the benefit of the trustor (Colquitt et al, 2007; Mayer et al, 1995).…”