Do voices carry valid information about a speaker’s personality?
Introduction
When meeting new people, we make spontaneous inferences and form first impressions about a wide range of characteristics (e.g. Ambady & Rosenthal, 1992). Besides physical characteristics, such as sex (Bachorowski and Owren, 1999, Puts et al., 2012), body size (Feinberg et al., 2005, Xu et al., 2013), or strength (Sell et al., 2010), we also form stable impressions about other relevant characteristics, including attitudes, intentions, values, beliefs and personality traits (Borkenau and Liebler, 1992, Borkenau et al., 2004, McAleer et al., 2014, Scherer, 1972).
While other peoples’ physical appearance might be an important cue to our social evaluations (Naumann, Vazire, Rentfrow, & Gosling, 2009), peoples’ voices are another factor that influences socially relevant impressions (Borkenau and Liebler, 1992, Mileva et al., 2018, Zuckerman and Driver, 1989). Indeed, when visual cues are absent, e.g., when listening to the radio or hearing a voice on the telephone, people still form judgments about others, based only on acoustic information (Borkenau and Liebler, 1992, Mileva et al., 2018).
Human voices and judgments based on their sound seem to have an association with important life outcomes: Studies have reported that voice characteristics predict mate choice (for an overview see Puts, Doll, & Hill, 2014), courtship outcomes (Leongómez et al., 2014), and reproductive success (Apicella, Feinberg, & Marlowe, 2007). Even voting behavior has been reported to be influenced by politicians’ voices, in that participants preferred to vote for candidates with a lower voice pitch (the rate of vocal fold vibrations which influences perceptions of pitch, usually equated with fundamental frequency, e.g. how high or deep a voice sounds), presumably because low pitch sounds more dominant, honest, intelligent, and attractive (Klofstad et al., 2015, Tigue et al., 2012). Further, CEOs with lower voice pitch oversee larger companies, receive higher compensations, and enjoy longer tenures than CEOs with higher voice pitch (Mayew, Parsons, & Venkatachalam, 2013).
Voice pitch has been associated with personality judgments in multiple studies, showing that men and women with lower voice pitch are perceived as more dominant (e.g. Borkowska and Pawlowski, 2011, Collins, 2000, Hodges-Simeon et al., 2010, Puts et al., 2006, Puts et al., 2007). Furthermore, people with higher pitched voices have been perceived to be more nervous (Apple, Streeter, & Krauss, 1979), less agreeable (Scherer, 1978), and higher in neuroticism (Aronovitch, 1976, Scherer, 1978). Moreover, men with lower voice pitch and lower formant frequencies (defined as resonant frequencies determined by the length and shape of the vocal tract and influence perceptions of vocal timbre, an example for perceivable changes in formant frequencies without changes in pitch is raising formant frequencies when inhaling helium gas) are perceived as more attractive (e.g. Collins, 2000, Feinberg et al., 2011, Hodges-Simeon et al., 2010, Jünger et al., 2018, Puts, 2005, Puts, 2006), while vocal attractiveness correlates positively with rated conscientiousness and negatively with rated neuroticism (Zuckerman, Miyake, & Elkin, 1995). These social evaluations and personality judgments based on other peoples’ voices are characterized by a high level of agreement between perceivers across different speech contents and contexts (Mahrholz et al., 2018, McAleer et al., 2014, Scherer, 1972). Interestingly, three studies suggest that judgments of extraversion and emotional stability based on voice are somewhat accurate (compared with target people’s self-reported personality traits; Borkenau & Liebler, 1992, with N = 100 self-reported personality; Scherer, 1972, with N = 59 self- and peer-reported personality; Scherer, 1978, with N = 24 peer-reported personality).
While there are some studies on personality judgments from voices, literature on vocal characteristics and their actual link to target personality and individual differences is rather scarce. Only three early studies have reported direct associations between some vocal characteristics and personality trait variables: Allport and Cantril (1934) reported that more extraverted people had ‘louder, more boisterous and carefree voices’ (in N = 3 male speakers scoring low, medium and high on judge-rated extraversion, respectively). Mallory and Miller (1958) reported that participants, whose voices were judged as “especially high”, self-reported lower dominance and higher introversion (in total N = 372 without any information on their sex, whereas it remains unclear how many participants had “especially high” voices and were, thus, part of the analyses). Borkenau and Liebler (1992) reported that self-reported agreeableness, but none of the other Big 5 personality traits, correlated significantly with other-rated higher voice pitch (in N = 100 with 50% women). Moreover, a relationship between lower voice pitch and markers associated with more self-reported unrestricted sociosexual behavior has been reported in that lower voice pitch in men, as well as more other-rated attractive voices in both sexes, were associated with self-reporting a higher number of sex partners (Hughes et al., 2004, Puts, 2005).
Nevertheless, no study has directly investigated links between actually measured acoustic parameters and self-reported personality traits. Therefore, this study’s aim is to examine which vocal characteristics, if any, are related to self-reported personality traits. For this purpose, we will combine different independent datasets from previous studies for secondary data analysis, resulting in a large sample size to investigate the relationship between vocal characteristics and personality traits.
Based on previous studies, we hypothesize that voice pitch is a valid cue to the speaker’s self-reported personality traits. More precisely, as previous studies reported associations between subjectively judged voice pitch and self-reported dominance and extraversion (Mallory & Miller, 1958), agreeableness (Borkenau & Liebler, 1992), and number of sexual partners (Hughes et al., 2004, Puts, 2005), we hypothesize:
Hypothesis 1: Participants with lower voice pitch will self-report as higher on dominance.
Hypothesis 2: Participants with lower voice pitch will self-report as higher on extraversion.
Hypothesis 3: Participants with lower voice pitch will self-report as lower on agreeableness.
Hypothesis 4: Participants with lower voice pitch will self-report as higher (more unrestricted) on sociosexual behavior.
Previous research has mostly neglected potential sex differences in the association between voice pitch and personality traits. As voice pitch is highly sexually dimorphic (sex differences in voice pitch are about 5 SDs; Puts et al., 2012), it seems plausible, that effects might go in opposite directions for male and female speakers. Thus, we decided to analyze speaker’s sex as potential moderator variable. We will also add formant frequencies as a predictor variable in an exploratory manner. Formant frequencies have been reported to influence vocal attractiveness and to be another important variable that might influence social impressions (e.g. Collins, 2000, Feinberg et al., 2011), but have not yet been linked to personality. Further, we will perform a number of exploratory analyses investigating the relationships between voice pitch, formant frequencies and conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness for experiences. We decided to do these analyses in an exploratory manner, as there is evidence that judgments of these self-reported traits are somewhat accurate (e.g. Borkenau & Liebler, 1992), and voice parameters are used by others to form these judgments (Aronovitch, 1976, Scherer, 1978, Zuckerman et al., 1995). However, no study so far has investigated whether voice pitch is, indeed, a valid cue to people’s conscientiousness, neuroticism or openness for experiences. Additionally, we will also investigate the associations of voice parameters with sociosexuality (full scale score), and its other two facets besides behavior, namely attitude and desire (Penke & Asendorpf, 2008). Again, judgments of sociosexuality at zero acquaintance have been reported to be somewhat accurate (Stillman & Maner, 2009), and the three facets are intercorrelated (Penke & Asendorpf, 2008), but research on voice pitch as a valid cue to sociosexuality and the three facets is missing in the literature.
Section snippets
Participants
A total of 2217 participants (n = 918 men; n = 1299 women; aged 18 to 56 years) were recruited in eleven different, independent previous studies focused on other research questions (see Table 1, Table 2 for more information). As the self-reported personality traits differ across studies (see Table 1), the sample size for analyses of the different self-reported personality traits are as follows: dominance with N = 988 (n = 492 women), Big 5 (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion,
Preliminary analyses and deviations from the registered plan
As a first step, we computed Cronbach’s alphas from the available raw data for all personality scales or extracted them from previously published studies using the exact same data. Alphas were predominantly good, thus items were averaged for each scale (Table 3, Table 4). Next, we analyzed the dropout rate for all datasets. Dropout rates differed from the expected rates for some datasets, leading to a loss of 2.78% of all participants. As a consequence, we had to update Table 2 and the total
Discussion
In the current study, we investigated the association between voice pitch and formant position with different self-reported personality traits, adjusted for the effects of sex and age. Results indicate that participants with lower voice pitch self-report as higher on dominance, extraversion and more unrestricted on sociosexual behavior, in line with our Hypotheses 1, 2 and 4. However, Hypotheses 3, which states that participants with lower voice pitch self-report as lower on agreeableness, was
Conclusion
In a large multilab project, we investigated the association between measured voice parameters and self-reported personality traits. We provide the first evidence that voice pitch might be a valid cue to at least some self-reported personality traits in men and women, including extraversion, dominance, sociosexual orientation including the facets behavior, attitude, and desire. Thus, personality might at least partly be expressed in voice pitch in men and women. We recommend that future
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2022, Acta PsychologicaCitation Excerpt :In light of these potential mechanisms linking personality to language and vocal features, what, if any, information about personality is conveyed in short semi-structured vocal samples? With respect to vocal features, research has tended to take one of two approaches, either gathering observers' ratings of personality based on voice samples (e.g., Borkenau & Liebler, 1992) or examining the links between personality and narrowly defined vocal parameters (e.g., Stern et al., 2021). The global rating of personality from speech has typically utilized a panel of judges to infer personality from vocal samples.