The Split-Second Path to Credibility: How a Speaker's Confidence and Gender Guide Our Instincts

What is it about?

Have you ever been in a conversation and found yourself deciding whether to trust someone—even before they finished speaking? This study explored this split-second social instinct using a simple but revealing setup. Researchers started with everyday sentences, and using voice-morphing technology, gently tweaked the speaker’s tone—making it sound more or less confident, or leaning more masculine or feminine—all while keeping the words themselves neutral. Then, as participants listened, they were asked to move a cursor toward “believe” or “disbelieve” on the screen. But the researchers weren’t just interested in where they clicked. By watching the path of the mouse—its curves, hesitations, and corrections—they could trace the hidden tug-of-war happening in the mind: moments of doubt, reconsideration, and certainty, all unfolding in real time before a choice was even made.

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Photo by Kane Reinholdtsen on Unsplash

Photo by Kane Reinholdtsen on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Our research found that voices that sounded more assured were consistently trusted faster and more firmly. Intriguingly, the perceived gender of a voice—whether it sounded more masculine or feminine—played no meaningful role in whether someone was deemed credible.

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