The Voice of Morality: The Two-Way Relationship Between the Beauty of Voice and Moral Goodness

• Published in: Journal of voice 2024-11, Vol.38 (6), p.1533.e1-1533.e9
• Main Authors: Wu, Chenjing, Liang, Xiaoling, Duan, Yan, Gong, Lulu, Zhang, Wei, He, Mingcheng, Ouyang, Yiting, He, Xianyou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adolescent; Adult; Beauty; China; Female; Humans; Judgment; Male; Morals; Social Perception; The beauty of voice—The two-way relationship—Moral goodness; Voice; Voice Quality; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0892-1997; 1873-4588; 1873-4588
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jvoice.2022.05.001

Morality is a point of great concern to us in our social interactions. We also assess people's morality based on a variety of external factors. Research has found that the beauty of faces can influence people's moral assessments, and that moral assessments can in turn influence our judgments about the beauty of faces. In real life, the voice is a very important communication mediu. People can gain knowledge of individuals through their voices. However, the relationship between voice beauty and moral goodness has never been investigated. So, the present study investigated the two-way relationship between voice beauty and moral goodness traits during impression formation. We collected empirical data from 32 college students in China followed the impression formation paradigm in Experiment 1 and collected empirical data from 32 college students in China followed moral priming paradigm. The results of Experiment 1 showed that high attractive voices were more likely to be judged to have higher moral goodness levels. Conversely, the results of Experiment 2 showed that the moral priming condition revealed a higher score for the voice than the immoral condition. The results showed that the bidirectional validation of voice beauty-moral goodness was significant, that is, participants tend to rate high attractive voices with higher moral goodness levels, and rate moral people’s voices with higher beauty. Based on these results, we found a two-way relationship between the beauty of voice and morality, and once again demonstrated the role of voice in message transmission.