First impressions aren't enough: the tone of your voice can change everything

First impressions can be deceptive, we know. But now we know better: research conducted by the University of Milan-Bicocca has demonstrated that a single word, or simply the tone of your voice, has the power to draw the face of another person to our minds.

To put it another way, a single word or a single intonation, can completely rewrite our mental representation of another person.

To get to their conclusions, researchers used a technique known as 'inverse correlation'. This method is well established for characterizing perceptual patterns (...), it's particularly suited to scenarios where the human observer is looking for details within a universal image, and the perceptual system is analyzed using radially symmetric noise.

Positive or negative voice

In this new study, the method was used to visualize the mental representations of faces constructed in the minds of a number of participants, both before and after listening to a 'positive' or 'negative' voice.

If the voice sounded soft and charming, the volunteers' minds reconstructed an image of a more open, pleasant and trustworthy face; conversely, a cold or hostile voice 'sketched' faces with stricter, harsher and more negative features. These effects occurred even when the faces had initially been described in opposite ways.

A spontaneous integration process

According to the researchers, this is a spontaneous process of sensory integration, which occurs automatically even when the face is observed solely for the purpose of memorizing its features, and not for the purpose of judging it.

Social impressions are not 'set in stone', explains Matteo Masi, lead author of the study. Listening to someone's voice can reprogram the visual image we have of that person in our mind. Our perceptions are open to information from multiple senses and are far more malleable than we think.

As the authors point out, the potential applications of this research range, theoretically, from staff recruitment to judicial processes, from interactions with voice assistants and AI-created avatars to building trust in the media and in politics.

Social psychology researcher Marco Brambilla adds that our minds don't take 'snapshots' of the people around us, they constantly construct them. Every new piece of information - a gesture, a word, a voice - can change what we think we see.

No, first impressions aren't everything!

Sources: University of Milan-Bicocca / Social Psychological and Personality Science.

(MP/©GreenMe.it/Translation and adaptation: The Global Nature/Pic: Unsplash)