Three professors at a zoom meeting…
It’s Covid at its worst. Virtual meetings are the reality. During one of these zooms Brian Scholl, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at Yale noticed, with shock, that he resonated with a colleague that he usually did NOT align with… and he reacted negatively to a colleague that he usually agreed with.
Thank you, Mark Albert, for sending me this Scientific American (July/Aug 2025) article about this one often overlooked tip on getting buy-in.
Key underlying difference between the two professors delivery
- 🎤 The colleague Scholl usually agreed with was using the “junky built-in microphone of an old laptop” at this zoom meeting.
- 🎤 The other colleague he typically disagreed with zoomed in from a professional-grade home-recording studio.
- 🎤 Scholl thought, “Was the quality of their sound, rather than the content of their arguments, swaying my judgment?”
Recent research*
🎤 The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggests “Scholl’s hunch was correct”.
🎤 Scholl found, in a series of experiments, that “poor audio quality consistently caused listeners to negatively judge speakers in a variety of contexts – even if the message was exactly the same in all of them.”
Why this matters
Scholl says, “It turns out this can really drive people’s impressions of how intelligent you are, how credible you are, and how datable and hirable you are.”
What you can do
- Find out how you sound to other people online.
- If you sound tinny, take action!
- You don’t need a fancy recording studio, but do the following: If you are using an older computer please don’t rely on its built-in mic. Instead use an external professional mic that plugs into your computer.
- Mic Drop: Fix your microphone.
FYI, Scholl’s tinny sounding colleague did upgrade to a better mic!
*PS: 🎤 I won’t detail the research that Scholl did, but he, along with Robert Walter-Terrill and Joan Danielle Ongchoco (all at Yale), recruited 5,100 people online, created audio recordings that were clear or tinny, and asked participants to rate the voices as hirable, datable, credible and intelligent.
While I had never thought about this before, it makes perfect sense to me. When people frequently use up talk or the word like in a sentence, I find it a very negative experience. It does not surprise me that vocal quality would trigger the same response.
Hi Elliot Michael – What a good observation. Upspeak (ending every sentence as if it were a question) is annoying and a tinny voice in combination with upspeak – BAD combo!! At least the latter can be more easily modified with a better microphone when you do virtual meetings. Thanks for your comment.