Effects of Secondhand Information on Impression Formation in Spoken Communication

Abstract

This study investigated the role of secondhand information for impression formation in spoken communication, using a voice transfer system. In Experiment 1, listeners were presented with spoken sentences that represented someone’s behavior in either a positive or negative prosody, which is a clue for forming impressions. Listeners rated each social impression of a person who took on a specific behavior. The results showed that the formed impressions were weaker when the affective characteristics of voices were inconsistent with those of behavioral descriptions. Experiment 2 tested the effects of sentence meanings on forming impressions of speakers’ voices using the same sound files. Results revealed that social impressions of speakers’ voices were also modulated by sentence meaning, even though the sentence was not related to the speaker. This study underscores the role of secondhand information in social impression and advances the understanding of the interaction between prosody and meanings in spoken communication.