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Updated: Dec 20, 2025

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How does familiarity with a voice affect trait judgements?

Nadine Lavan1, Mila Mileva2,3, Carolyn McGettigan1

  • 1Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, UK.

British Journal of Psychology (London, England : 1953)
|May 24, 2020
PubMed
Summary

Listener familiarity with a voice does not significantly alter personality judgments, even when voices vary. This suggests that knowing someone’s voice doesn’t make judgments less susceptible to vocal variability.

Keywords:
dominancefamiliaritytrait perceptiontrustworthinessvariabilityvoices

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Area of Science:

  • Psychology
  • Acoustic Phonetics
  • Social Cognition

Background:

  • Listeners form impressions of character from voices.
  • Vocal variability within individuals can affect trait judgments.
  • The impact of voice familiarity on these judgments is not well understood.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how familiarity with a voice influences trait judgments.
  • To determine if familiarity reduces susceptibility to vocal variability.
  • To assess if semantic knowledge about a person affects voice-based judgments.

Main Methods:

  • Three experiments used a between-subjects design.
  • Familiarity was established through lab training or TV exposure.
  • Trait judgments from variable voice recordings were compared between familiar and unfamiliar listeners.

Main Results:

  • No significant effect of familiarity on trait judgments was found.
  • Familiarity did not systematically reduce variability in judgments.
  • Neither training nor TV exposure altered susceptibility to vocal variability.

Conclusions:

  • Listener familiarity with a voice does not mitigate the impact of vocal variability on trait judgments.
  • Semantic knowledge about a person does not appear to influence voice-based personality impressions.
  • Vocal characteristics may be less influential in trait judgments than previously assumed.