Voice-based assessments of trustworthiness, competence, and warmth in blind and sighted adults

Abstract

The study of voice perception in congenitally blind individuals allows researchers rare insight into how a lifetime of visual deprivation affects the development of voice perception. Previous studies have suggested that blind adults outperform their sighted counterparts in low-level auditory tasks testing spatial localization and pitch discrimination, as well as in verbal speech processing; however, blind persons generally show no advantage in nonverbal voice recognition or discrimination tasks. The present study is the first to examine whether visual experience influences the development of social stereotypes that are formed on the basis of nonverbal vocal characteristics (i.e., voice pitch). Groups of 27 congenitally or early-blind adults and 23 sighted controls assessed the trustworthiness, competence, and warmth of men and women speaking a series of vowels, whose voice pitches had been experimentally raised or lowered. Blind and sighted listeners judged both men’s and women’s voices with lowered pitch as being more competent and trustworthy than voices with raised pitch. In contrast, raised-pitch voices were judged as being warmer than were lowered-pitch voices, but only for women’s voices. Crucially, blind and sighted persons did not differ in their voice-based assessments of competence or warmth, or in their certainty of these assessments, whereas the association between low pitch and trustworthiness in women’s voices was weaker among blind than sighted participants. This latter result suggests that blind persons may rely less heavily on nonverbal cues to trustworthiness compared to sighted persons. Ultimately, our findings suggest that robust perceptual associations that systematically link voice pitch to the social and personal dimensions of a speaker can develop without visual input.

High voice pitch mitigates the aversiveness of antisocial cues in men's speech

“…Nearly all prior work has manipulated pitch by ±0.5 ERBs (Klofstad et al ., ; O'Connor & Barclay, ; Vukovic et al ., ), with the exception of a ±0.75 ERB manipulation by Oleszkiewicz et al . (). Differences among study findings are also unlikely to be driven by speech content.…”

“…These results are consistent with prior work finding that lower‐pitched male voices are perceived as more attractive but as less trustworthy than are higher‐pitched male voices (Montano et al ., ; O'Connor & Barclay, ; O'Connor & Feinberg, ; O'Connor et al ., ; O'Connor, Pisanski, et al ., ). Some other research has either failed to detect a main effect of voice pitch on trustworthiness (Klofstad et al ., ; Vukovic et al ., ) or has found that lower‐pitched male voices are perceived as relatively trustworthy (Oleszkiewicz et al ., ; Tigue et al ., ). The reason for this disagreement among findings is currently unclear, but is unlikely to be driven by the magnitude of pitch manipulation.…”

“…Our results agree with other research using isolated English vowel sounds (high pitch as trustworthy, O'Connor & Barclay, ). However, there is no consistent pattern of results according to stimuli speaking vowel sounds (low pitch as trustworthy, Oleszkiewicz et al ., ; no main effect of pitch on trustworthiness, Vukovic et al ., ) or short sentences (no main effect of voice pitch on trustworthiness, Klofstad et al ., ; low pitch as trustworthy, Tigue et al ., ). Future research may aim to identify potential explanations for the discrepancy across study findings.…”

“…In comparison with lower‐pitched voices, women tend to trust higher‐pitched, feminine‐sounding male voices more in general (McAleer, Todorov, & Belin, ; O'Connor & Barclay, ), financial (Montano, Tigue, Isenstein, Barclay, & Feinberg, ; O'Connor & Barclay, ), and romantic contexts (O'Connor & Barclay, ; O'Connor, Pisanski, Tigue, Fraccaro, & Feinberg, a; O'Connor, Re, & Feinberg, ). In contrast, other work finds that lower‐pitched male voices are perceived as more trustworthy in general than are higher‐pitched male voices (Oleszkiewicz, Pisanski, Lachowicz‐Tabaczek, & Sorokowska, ; Tigue et al ., ), or have failed to detect a significant main effect of male voice pitch on perceptions of trustworthiness (Klofstad, Anderson, & Peters, ; Vukovic et al ., ). Therefore, the evidence for the influence of male voice pitch on perceptions of trustworthiness is mixed.…”

Does he sound cooperative? Acoustic correlates of cooperativeness

“…Several acoustic features influence the perception of how trustworthy and cooperative the speaker is (Belin et al, 2017;Knowles & Little, 2016;Montano et al, 2017;O'Connor & Barclay, 2017;Oleszkiewicz et al, 2017;Ponsot et al, 2018;Tigue et al, 2012;Tsantani et al, 2016). Their influence could stem from the pleiotropic effect of testosterone on both acoustic features and cooperative behaviours (O'Connor & Barclay, 2017).…”