We all form impressions when we talk to people. We like to think we’re rational and focus on what others say — but, in reality, we’re all prone to subtle biases. Confidence, appearance, even the way someone carries themselves can sway our judgment. But what happens when these interactions move online?

With the rise of videoconferencing, especially post-pandemic, many of our conversations — work meetings, job interviews, even dating—have shifted to virtual spaces. This digital shift brought some upsides (convenience), some downsides (awkward silences, anyone?), and, according to a new study, some unexpected consequences. Specifically, the quality of your microphone might be affecting how people judge you.

“Superficial auditory properties can have surprisingly deep consequences for higher-level social judgments,” the researchers say.

Hear me out

A team of researchers conducted a series of experiments to explore how sound quality influences perception. They recorded people speaking in various scenarios — like job interviews or applying for insurance. Then, they created both high-quality and low-quality versions of those recordings.

Participants were asked to listen to the recordings and evaluate the speakers. Importantly, the message was exactly the same in both versions, and the speech remained fully intelligible. The only difference was audio quality and yet, the results were striking.

“Though the manipulations carried no implications about the speakers themselves, common disfluent auditory signals (as in “tinny” speech) led to decreased judgments of intelligence, hireability, credibility, and romantic desirability,” the researchers note in the study. “Such effects may become more relevant as daily communication via videoconferencing becomes increasingly widespread.”

In other words, a tinny mic can make you seem less smart, less trustworthy, and even less attractive — regardless of what you’re saying.

A cheap microphone is costly

To make sure the effect wasn’t tied to any one demographic, the researchers tested male and female voices, American and British accents, and even computer-synthesized speech. Across the board, the pattern held: poorer audio quality led to lower ratings.

The difference was substantial. For instance, in the case of hiring, people were much more likely to hire the person with a very clear microphone.

“Now that videoconferencing has become so ubiquitous, we wondered how the sounds of people’s voices might be influencing others’ impressions, beyond the actual words they speak,” said senior author Brian Scholl, professor of psychology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Wu Tsai Institute. “Every experiment we conducted showed that a familiar tinny or hollow sound associated with a poor-quality microphone negatively affects people’s impressions of a speaker — independent of the message conveyed.”

So, what does this mean for us?

The strength of the effect surprised even the researcher. This effect could have a strong evolutionary reason, as we’re constantly trying to infer more information from the people we’re talking to. But it could also be that we’re just in a weird moment where we’re hearing other people’s voices through an added layer of technology and we’re not just used to it.

So, if you’re job hunting, dating online, or just trying to make a good impression in meetings, it might be worth spending a bit on a better mic. Think of it less as a tech upgrade and more as a life upgrade.

As the authors put it: “So, before joining your next videoconference, you may want to consider how much a cheap microphone may really be costing you.”

The study “Superficial auditory (dis)fluency biases higher-level social judgment” has been published in the journal Psychological and Cognitive Sciences.