FIRST impressions matter, especially for those applying for a job. A study framed in the context of such a scenario in the February issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin looked at the social judgments people made based solely on the voices they heard.

The study was led by Sei Jin Ko, a social psychologist in Northwestern University?s Kellogg School of Management who studies stereotypes. While studies have shown that people make judgments about others based on their physical features, Ko and her colleagues wrote, ?life is not like a silent movie in which we are only provided with images of a target individual. Indeed our social world is made up of more than what we soak in through our eyes.?

Ko and her colleagues from the University of Boulder at Colorado and the Netherlands? Tilburg University wanted to find out what effect vocal cues had on making judgments about people.

Effects of vocal cues

The researchers conducted the study with the help of students from the University of Groningen, the second oldest university in the Netherlands. In one experiment, Ko and her colleagues pretended they wanted to compare the impressions of professional job recruiters going through resumés against the impressions of the public, represented by the students.

The researchers looked at two social judgments in particular: warmth and competence. Warmth might be perceived as customer service manners; if the person comes across as friendly vs uncaring. Competence, on the other hand, was measured by whether or not a person is motivated to succeed vs being seen as lazy.

A dozen resumés were prepared for the experiment: six designed to represent feminine applicants and the other six keyed to represent masculine applicants. The researchers prepared resumés by assigning jobs and hobbies that would stereotypically represent each gender. For example, a ?stereotypically masculine? resumé listed jobs such as working at an auto supply store or as a security guard. In contrast, a ?feminine? resumé listed jobs such as working in a flower shop or as an aerobics instructor.

Four each of the masculine and feminine resumés were then selected to each be read aloud by two pairs of men and women. In each pairing, one person had been selected to do the reading because s/he sounded more feminine (as judged by a group made up of 90 percent women), regardless of gender, while the other person was judged as sounding less feminine.

Recordings of each rendition of the resumés were played back for a group of 40 females and 22 males, who then individually rated each supposed job applicant based on the text version of the resumé and the voices they heard.

Considered warmer

Based on the students? ratings, researchers found that in general, the supposed applicants with the feminine resumés were considered warmer and more competent than those with the masculine resumés.

Within the voice ranges though, regardless of gender, the speakers with more feminine voices came across as ?significantly warmer? than those with less feminine voices. The latter, however, were considered ?significantly more competent.? Similar results were obtained in a second version of the experiment.

?In the end,? Ko and her colleagues concluded, ?it may not only be who you are, what you look like, and what you have accomplished, but also how you sound that affects the impressions formed of you.?

These findings should be taken with a grain of salt; the researchers noted that given the job application context, it?s possible the student judges were affected by the desire not to appear biased toward one gender or another. Also, since the students participating in the study were predominantly female, it?s worth wondering what the findings might have been if, say, equal groups of male and female students had done the listening and judging to see if the perceptions about warmth and competence still applied.

E-mail the author at massie@massie.com