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

Gaby Mahrholz,Phil Mcaleer,Pascal Belin,Angel Blanch

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0204991

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).

Highlights

First impressions play a fundamental role in life as they guide our thoughts, affect subsequent behaviours, and, in turn, influence decisions towards a person [1, 2]
Moderate to strong correlations were found between ratings of the same speaker saying one word and saying a full sentence, for both voice sex, in each of the tested personality traits. This effect was noticeably stronger in male voices than in female voices
Linear mixed effects modelling revealed that trait ratings for sentences and socially-ambiguous content can be significantly predicted from words and socially-relevant content respectively

Summary

Introduction

First impressions play a fundamental role in life as they guide our thoughts, affect subsequent behaviours, and, in turn, influence decisions towards a person [1, 2]. Largely based on non-verbal vocal information (such as pitch and intonation) rather than verbal content (i.e. what is said), it has been shown that rapid assessments are made about a speaker’s affective state [17,18,19], confidence level [20], perceived intelligence [21], and personality [1, 6, 22,23,24] Such rapid judgements impact our business decisions [25], voting and political preferences [26,27,28,29,30,31], whom we hire [21], whom we laugh with [19, 32], and whom we are attracted to [22,23,24]. The term “first impressions” refers to brief (e.g. 100 ms) or prolonged exposure to a target (e.g. 5 minutes) where there is no interaction between participant and target [2, 43, 44], as opposed to what might be termed “first interactions” where participants interact together for a period before rating the other [45]

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