How Your Voice Instantly Betrays Your Personality

We often say that we understand the nature of someone as soon as we hear him speak. Indeed, according to a new study published in the online resource «PLoS One», something like that can happen since it takes less than a second to figure out the personality of a person based only on his voice.

It is known that the voice transmits sensitive signals that betray gender, age, and even the physical condition or certain personality traits. However Dr Phil McAleer and his colleagues from the University of Glasgow decided to find out if we can get an immediate impression by a person’s voice.

The voice experiment

In order to give an answer to their question, the researchers recorded 64 people reading a text. Then they isolated the word ‘hello‘, which was used during the next phase of the experiment when 320 people were asked to listen to this recording and rate the voices they heard on a scale from 1 to 9 concerning 10 different personality traits including reliability, dominance and attractiveness. “We were surprised by how similar the answers of the 320 volunteers were,” noted Dr. McAleer. “On a scale in which 0 corresponded to the lack of a personality trait and 1 – to the full association with this trait, the final score for all the 10 traits reached 0.92, which means that most volunteers agreed to a large extent on how each voice represented each personality trait.”

Evolutionary explanation

It makes sense that decisions about one’s personality are taken so quickly, notes Dr. McAleer. “There’s an evolutionary explanation for this: we all want to know quickly whether we can trust someone in order to know if we should approach him, or rather run away. It would be a big waste of time if we were taking too long to come to this conclusion.” The impression we make on others through our voice – even through a voice recording lasting just 390 mm of a second – seems to be defined by different factors: for example, the tone of voice of a person affects how reliable he shows. “A person who raises his voice seems more reliable,” says Dr. McAleer.

‘Manageable’ aspects of voice

In accordance with the researcher, it is possible to change some aspects of our voice. “There is, for example, a rumor that Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth were trained to make their voices sound more dominant.” However, some other aspects of one’s voice are less “manageable”. For example, the shape of the vocal tract significantly affects how dominant the voice sounds.

The research team hopes that the results of the study can be used to create an artificial voice that could help persons who lost their own due to a medical problem and make the voices of navigation systems and robots more attractive. “It may also be used by companies in choosing the best candidate for certain job positions. For example, no one would want a call center employee with a voice that shows unreliability,” concludes Dr. McAleer.

Read more at: http://www.learning-mind.com/how-your-voice-instantly-betrays-your-personality/