What the science says
When your sound is poor, people like you less. In a 2018 study, listeners also judged speakers with poor audio as less intelligent, and their work as less important.
The study
Eryn Newman of the Australian National University and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Southern California ran two experiments, published in Science Communication in 2018.
In the first, 97 people watched short clips, two or three minutes long, from two conference talks: one on engineering and one on physics. Some heard the original sound and others heard a version with poorer audio. Everything else was identical.
In the second, 99 people listened to two interviews from the NPR radio show Science Friday, one with a geneticist and one with a physicist, again with either good or poor sound.
What they found
With poor sound, people found the speakers less likeable and less intelligent. They also rated the talks as worse and the research as less important.
“As soon as we reduced the audio quality, all of a sudden, the scientists and their research lost credibility,” Newman said.
Why it happens
Schwarz explains it with an idea psychologists call processing fluency: information that’s easy to take in feels more familiar and more believable. “When you make it difficult for people to process information, it becomes less credible,” he said.
What it means for your calls
The study used recorded talks and interviews, not video calls. We think the lesson carries over, because a muffled headset microphone or an echo does the same thing: it makes you harder to take in. Most of those problems cost nothing to fix.
Check your setup. It takes about two minutes.
Sources
- Newman, E. J., and Schwarz, N. (2018). Good Sound, Good Research: How Audio Quality Influences Perceptions of the Research and Researcher (opens in a new tab). Science Communication.
- Trust in science, news and experts is influenced by sound quality (opens in a new tab), Phys.org, April 2018. The study details and quotes on this page come from this summary.