A person’s speech communicates his or her thoughts and feelings. We predicted that beyond conveying the contents of a person’s mind, a person’s speech also conveys mental capacity, such that hearing a person explain his or her beliefs makes the person seem more mentally capable—and therefore seem to possess more uniquely human mental traits—than reading the same content. We expected this effect to emerge when people are perceived as relatively mindless, such as when they disagree with the evaluator’s own beliefs. Three experiments involving polarizing attitudinal issues and political opinions supported these hypotheses. A fourth experiment identified paralinguistic cues in the human voice that convey basic mental capacities. These results suggest that the medium through which people communicate may systematically influence the impressions they form of each other. The tendency to denigrate the minds of the opposition may be tempered by giving them, quite literally, a voice.
AmesD. R. (2004). Strategies for social inference: A similarity contingency model of projection and stereotyping in attribute prevalence estimates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 573–585.
2.
BanzigerT.SchererK. R. (2005). The role of intonation in emotional expressions. Speech Communication, 46, 252–267.
3.
BastianB.HaslamN. (2010). Excluded from humanity: The dehumanizing effects of social ostracism. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 107–113.
4.
BoersmaP.WeeninkD. (2016). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 6.0.30) [Computer software]. Retrieved from http://www.praat.org/
5.
CarlinG. (1984). Carlin on Campus [Record]. United States: Eardrum Records.
6.
EpleyN.KrugerJ. (2005). When what you type isn’t what they read: The perseverance of stereotypes and expectancies over e-mail. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 414–422.
7.
EpleyN.WaytzA. (2010). Mind perception. In FiskeS. T.GilbertD. T.LindzeyG. (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (5th ed., pp. 498–541). New York, NY: Wiley.
8.
GrayH. M.GrayK.WegnerD. M. (2007). Dimensions of mind perception. Science, 315, 619.
9.
HallJ. A.Schmid MastM. (2007). Sources of accuracy in the empathic accuracy paradigm. Emotion, 7, 438–446.
10.
HarrisL. T.FiskeS. T. (2009). Social neuroscience evidence for dehumanised perception. European Review of Social Psychology, 20, 192–231.
11.
HaslamN. (2006). Dehumanization: An integrated review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 252–264.
12.
HaslamN.BainP. (2007). Humanizing the self: Moderators of the attribution of lesser humanness to others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 57–68.
13.
HaslamN.BainP.DougeL.LeeM.BastianB. (2005). More human than you: Attributing humanness to self and others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 937–950.
14.
HaslamN.LoughnanS. (2014). Dehumanization and infrahumanization. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 399–423.
15.
HaslamN.LoughnanS.HollandE. (2013). The psychology of humanness. In GervaisS. J. (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation: Vol. 60. Objectification and (de)humanization (pp. 25–52). New York, NY: Springer Science.
16.
HughesS. M.MogilskiJ. K.HarrisonM. A. (2014). The perception and parameters of intentional voice manipulation. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 38, 107–127.
17.
JonesE. E.NisbettR. E. (1972). The actor and the observer: Divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior. In JonesE. E.KanouseD.KelleyH. H.NisbettR. E.ValinsS.WeinerB. (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior (pp. 79–94). Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
18.
KennedyK. A.ProninE. (2008). When disagreement gets ugly: Perceptions of bias and the escalation of conflict. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 833–848.
19.
KruegerJ. (2000). The projective perception of the social world: A building block of social comparison processes. In SulsJ.WheelerL. (Eds.), Handbook of social comparison: Theory and research (pp. 323–351). New York, NY: Plenum/Kluwer.
20.
KrugerJ.EpleyN.ParkerJ.NgZ. (2005). Egocentrism over e-mail: Can people communicate as well as they think?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 925–936.
21.
LaplanteD.AmbadyN. (2003). On how things are said: Voice tone, voice intensity, verbal content, and perceptions of politeness. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 22, 434–441.
22.
LeyensJ.-P.PaladinoP. M.Rodriguez-TorresR.VaesJ.DemoulinS.Rodriguez-PerezA.GauntR. (2000). The emotional side of prejudice: The role of secondary emotions. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 4, 186–197.
23.
MalleB. F.KnobeJ.NelsonS. (2007). Actor-observer asymmetries in explanations of behavior: New answers to an old question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 491–514.
24.
McAleerP.TodorovA.BelinP. (2014). How do you say ‘hello’? Personality impressions from brief novel voices. PLoS ONE, 9(3), Article e90779. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0090779
25.
PinkerS.BloomP. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 707–727.
26.
PreacherK. J.HayesA. F. (2008). Asymptotic and resampling strategies for assessing and comparing indirect effects in multiple mediator models. Behavior Research Methods, 40, 879–891.
27.
ProninE. (2009). The introspection illusion. In ZannaM. P. (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 41, pp. 1–67). Burlington, MA: Academic Press.
28.
ProninE.LinD. Y.RossL. (2002). The bias blind spot: Perceptions of bias in self versus others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 369–381.
29.
RossL.WardA. (1996). Naïve realism in everyday life: Implications for social conflict and misunderstanding. In BrownT.ReedE.TurielE. (Eds.), Values and knowledge (pp. 103–135). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
30.
SchererK. R.BanseR.WallbottH. G. (2001). Emotion inferences from vocal expression correlate across languages and cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 32, 76–92.
31.
SchroederJ.EpleyN. (2015). The sound of intellect: Speech reveals a thoughtful mind, increasing a job candidate’s appeal. Psychological Science, 26, 877–891.
32.
SchroederJ.EpleyN. (2016). Mistaking minds and machines: How speech affects dehumanization and anthropomorphism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145, 1427–1437.
33.
VaesJ.LeyensJ.-P.PaladinoM. P.MirandaM. P. (2012). We are human, they are not: Driving forces behind outgroup dehumanisation and the humanisation of the ingroup. European Review of Social Psychology, 23, 64–106.
34.
WaytzA.SchroederJ.EpleyN. (2014). The lesser minds problem. In BainP.VaesJ.LeyensJ. P. (Eds.), Humanness and dehumanization (pp. 49–67). London, England: Psychology Press.
35.
WegnerD. M.GilbertD. T. (2000). Social psychology—the science of human experience. In BlessH.ForgasJ. P. (Eds.), The message within: The role of subjective experience in social cognition and behavior (pp. 1–9). Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press.
36.
WeisbuchM.PaukerK.AmbadyN. (2009). The subtle transmission of race bias via televised nonverbal behavior. Science, 326, 1711–1714.
37.
WellsG. L.WindschitlP. D. (1999). Stimulus sampling and social psychological experimentation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 1115–1125.
38.
ZakiJ.BolgerN.OchsnerK. (2009). Unpacking the informational bases of empathic accuracy. Emotion, 9, 478–487.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
