The influence of gender stereotypes on gender judgement and impression evaluation based on face and voice

The present study examined the influence of gender stereotype information on cognitive judgments and impression evaluations of faces and voices. A 2 × 2 × 2 design was employed, with Perceptual Target (Face vs. Voice), Gender Stereotype Information (Consistent vs. Inconsistent) and Gender of Perceptual Targets (Male and Female) serving as within-subject factors. The results demonstrated that when gender stereotype information was consistent with the perceptual target's gender, response times for face gender judgments were shorter than for voice gender judgments. Nevertheless, the accuracy of gender judgments was higher for voices than faces. Furthermore, likability ratings for targets were significantly higher when gender stereotype information was consistent with the target than when it was inconsistent, for both face and voice judgments. These findings indicate that visual and auditory cues are processed differently in the context of gender judgments, thereby highlighting the distinct roles of facial and vocal information in gender perception. The current study contributes to understanding the complex interplay between gender stereotypes and multimodal social information processing.

You are how you speak: The roles of vocal pitch and semantic cues in shaping social perceptions

Social perceptions of speakers are influenced by their voice information, including vocal characteristics and semantic content. Our study investigated how individuals' warmth- and competence-related perceptions of speakers were affected by vocal pitch levels (i.e., high/low) and three kinds of semantic cues (i.e., prosocial, antisocial, and neutral) simultaneously. We have three key findings. First, antisocial cues negatively affected social perceptions, regardless of speakers' gender. However, prosocial cues did not have positive impacts on evaluations of speakers because ratings were similar between prosocial cues and neutral cues. Second, female vocal pitch mattered for warmth-related perceptions but not for competence-related perceptions. The role of semantic cues should be additionally considered when investigating the impact of male vocal pitch on these perceptions. For example, higher-pitched men in prosocial contexts were perceived as warmer, while low-pitched men in antisocial contexts were judged as more competent. Third, the connection between vocal pitch and two kinds of perceptions showed an opposite trend, in which high pitch was related to more warmth but less competence, while the low pitch was associated with less warmth but more competence. These findings extend the understanding of the role of vocal pitch in the formation of stereotypes of strangers in different semantic contexts.

Do Voice-Based Judgments of Socially Relevant Speaker Traits Differ Across Speech Types?

PURPOSE

The human voice is a powerful and evolved social tool, with hundreds of studies showing that nonverbal vocal parameters robustly influence listeners' perceptions of socially meaningful speaker traits, ranging from perceived gender and age to attractiveness and trustworthiness. However, these studies have utilized a wide variety of voice stimuli to measure listeners' voice-based judgments of these traits. Here, in the largest scale study known to date, we test whether listeners judge the same unseen speakers differently depending on the complexity of the neutral speech stimulus, from single vowel sounds to a full paragraph.

METHOD

In a playback experiment testing 2,618 listeners, we examine whether commonly studied voice-based judgments of attractiveness, trustworthiness, dominance, likability, femininity/masculinity, and health differ if listeners hear isolated vowels, a series of vowels, single words, single sentences (greeting), counting from 1 to 10, or a full paragraph recited aloud (Rainbow Passage), recorded from the same 208 men and women. Data were collected using a custom-designed interface in which vocalizers and traits were randomly assigned to raters.

RESULTS

Linear-mixed models show that the type of voice stimulus does indeed consistently affect listeners' judgments. Overall, ratings of attractiveness, trustworthiness, dominance, likability, health, masculinity among men, and femininity among women increase as speech duration increases. At the same time, speaker-level regression analyses show that interindividual differences in perceived speaker traits are largely preserved across voice stimuli, especially among those of a similar duration.

CONCLUSIONS

Socially relevant perceptions of speakers are not wholly changed but rather moderated by the length of their speech. Indeed, the same vocalizer is perceived in a similar way regardless of which neutral statements they speak, with the caveat that longer utterances explain the most shared variance in listeners' judgments and elicit the highest ratings on all traits, possibly by providing additional nonverbal information to listeners.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21158890.

Do Men Have No Need for “Feminist” Artificial Intelligence? Agentic and Gendered Voice Assistants in the Light of Basic Psychological Needs

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is supposed to perform tasks autonomously, make competent decisions, and interact socially with people. From a psychological perspective, AI can thus be expected to impact users’ three Basic Psychological Needs (BPNs), namely (i) autonomy, (ii) competence, and (iii) relatedness to others. While research highlights the fulfillment of these needs as central to human motivation and well-being, their role in the acceptance of AI applications has hitherto received little consideration. Addressing this research gap, our study examined the influence of BPN Satisfaction on Intention to Use (ITU) an AI assistant for personal banking. In a 2×2 factorial online experiment, 282 participants (154 males, 126 females, two non-binary participants) watched a video of an AI finance coach with a female or male synthetic voice that exhibited either high or low agency (i.e., capacity for self-control). In combination, these factors resulted either in AI assistants conforming to traditional gender stereotypes (e.g., low-agency female) or in non-conforming conditions (e.g., high-agency female). Although the experimental manipulations had no significant influence on participants’ relatedness and competence satisfaction, a strong effect on autonomy satisfaction was found. As further analyses revealed, this effect was attributable only to male participants, who felt their autonomy need significantly more satisfied by the low-agency female assistant, consistent with stereotypical images of women, than by the high-agency female assistant. A significant indirect effects model showed that the greater autonomy satisfaction that men, unlike women, experienced from the low-agency female assistant led to higher ITU. The findings are discussed in terms of their practical relevance and the risk of reproducing traditional gender stereotypes through technology design.