Even if you want to, you can't ignore how people look or sound
Study has implications for racial stereotyping

Date:
July 22, 2020
Source:
Ohio State University
Summary:
Your perceptions of someone you just met are influenced in part
by what they look like and how they sound. But can you ignore
how someone looks or how they sound if you're told it is not
relevant? Probably not, at least in most cases, a new study found.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
Your perceptions of someone you just met are influenced in part by what
they look like and how they sound.


==========================================================================
But can you ignore how someone looks or how they sound if you're told
it is not relevant? Probably not, at least in most cases, a new Ohio
State University study found.

For example, some study participants were shown a photo of a face and
heard a brief snippet of speech at the same time and were told that the
photo and voice belonged to different people.

In some cases, participants were told to rate how strong an accent they
thought the person shown in the photo would have.

Participants thought the person in the photo would have a more accented
voice if the words they heard also had a stronger accent -- despite
being told the image and sound represented two different people.



========================================================================== "Even though we told them to ignore the voice, they couldn't do it
completely," said study author Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, an associate
professor of linguistics at Ohio State.

"Some of the information from the voice seeped into their evaluation of
the face." The same was true when participants were asked to evaluate
how "good-looking" the person with a particular voice was -- they were influenced by the photo they viewed, even when told it was a different
person from the speaker they heard.

Although study participants usually could not ignore the irrelevant information, there was one intriguing exception in which participants
feared showing a racial stereotype when it came to gauging accented
voices.

The study was published online this week in the Journal of
Sociolinguistics.



==========================================================================
The study included 1,034 people who visited an exhibit hosted by Ohio
State's Department of Linguistics at the Center of Science and Industry,
a science museum in Columbus.

Participants were shown photos of 15 men on a television screen. As each
photo was shown, they heard a single-word recording repeated three times
over the course of five seconds, also by one of 15 men. Depending on what
group they were in, participants had to rate how accented or good-looking
the face or the voice was.

Some of the speakers these study participants heard had been rated by
people in a previous study as sounding relatively unaccented. Other
voices were from people who had learned English at older ages and had
been rated as having more of an accent.

When participants evaluated the combined face and voice and were not
told to ignore anything, they evaluated "good-looking" mostly based on
the face, and "accented" on the voice -- as expected.

But some people were told to evaluate the face while ignoring the voice,
or evaluate the voice while ignoring the face, because they represented
two different people.

In those cases, some people evaluated the face on the "good-looking"
dimension and some evaluated the face on the "accented" dimension. The
same was true for evaluating the voice. In both cases, they had to ignore
the other input, voice or face.

"We found that people could exercise some control over what information
to favor, the voice or the face, depending on what we told them to do," Campbell- Kibler said.

"But in most cases, they were unable to entirely eliminate the irrelevant information." There was one exception: People were able to completely
ignore the face when rating how accented the voice sounded.

Campbell-Kibler said the reason seems to be that the participants, most of
whom were white, were being careful not to show any racial stereotyping.

"Some of the participants explicitly told us they were attempting to
avoid responses that could be seen as stereotypical," she said.

They knew that how a person looks has no real connection to how they
sound, even though racial stereotypes often prompt people to associate
strong accents with people who don't look white.

"They sensed a danger is showing racial bias when it came to evaluating accents. That's why they were careful to exclude what the face looked
like when evaluating if the voice sounded accented," Campbell-Kibler said.

"They didn't have that issue when evaluating 'good-looking,' because
that is seen as subjective enough that you can't really be wrong," Campbell-Kibler said.

Because this study used photographs rather than video, the audio people
heard had a stronger influence on them than it might in real life,
she said. Videos would probably have a stronger effect on people's
evaluations than these still images.

But the main message is the same: We are influenced by all the information
we have available, whether it is applicable or not.

"It is hard to ignore socially relevant information your senses perceive,
even if we tell you it is not relevant to the task you have right now," Campbell- Kibler said.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Ohio_State_University. Original
written by Jeff Grabmeier. Note: Content may be edited for style and
length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Kathryn Campbell‐Kibler. Deliberative control in audiovisual
sociolinguistic perception*. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 2020;
DOI: 10.1111/josl.12418 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200722083758.htm

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