Could your microphone be affecting your job prospects?

evEn IF yOU cAN UNdersTanD eVEry OnE oF tHese WORdS, HOW thiS SEntENce lOOks, MaTTeRs.  

Beyond being an affront to CBC News style, a sentence like the one above also makes the reader work a little harder, affecting a concept called fluency. 

"Fluency is just the ease with which we process information," says Brian Scholl, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University. 

Scholl's latest research adds to the knowledge that fluency also affects how we judge what we hear, and was inspired by the way many of us communicate these days: video calls. 

In a series of experiments, thousands of people across ages and demographics listened to short audio recordings, and were asked to make judgments afterward. 

"Critically, half of the subjects heard a very rich, resonant recording," Scholl explained, while the other group heard the same recording, "but filtered so that it sounded like it was coming through a sort of tinny microphone." 

In other words, half heard the kind of audio quality we've all been hearing since the pandemic thrust Zoom, WhatsApp and FaceTime calls into ubiquity. 

In one example, where a male voice was applying for a job, half the participants heard the nicer sounding audio, while the other half heard the poorer quality one. Here's a sample of those recordings, combined: 

"What we found across many different judgments is that people were less likely to hire someone when they were speaking that familiar tinny quality," Scholl said. Participants rated voices on a sliding scale of whether they were hireable, from "very unlikely" to "very likely." 

That hollow-sounding audio also made participants rate the speaker as less credible and less intelligent. This was even the case when the speaker was a computerized voice — meaning even the cadence of a robot was deemed more trustworthy, as long as the audio sounded richer.

One of the experiments even led participants to rate the higher quality human recording as someone they would more likely go on a date with.

Scholl says this "superficial" aspect of our communication can influence our impressions of people without us knowing it.

Sonia Kang, a professor of organizational behaviour and human resource management at the University of Toronto, says that fluency and disfluency play a big role in the impressions we make on other people. 

And in first-time scenarios like job interviews, the impact is greater.