Mic Drop

To win trust and admiration, fix your microphone

- Rachel Nuwer

LIKE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of other people around the world, Brian Scholl, a psychologist and cognitive scientist at Yale University, spent much of the COVID pandemic on Zoom. But during one digital faculty meeting, he found himself reacting unexpectedly to two of his colleagues. One was a close collaborator with whom Scholl usually saw eye to eye, and the other was someone whose opinions tended to differ from his own. On that particular day, though, he found himself siding with the latter colleague. "Everything he said was so rich and resonant," Scholl recalls.

As he reflected afterward, Scholl realized there was a key underlying difference between the two men's delivery: the colleague with whom Scholl usually agreed had been using the junky built-in microphone of an old laptop, whereas the one with whom he typically disagreed had called in from a professional-grade homerecording studio. Scholl began to suspect that it was the quality of their sound, rather than the content of their arguments, that had swayed his judgment.

Research published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA suggests Scholl's hunch was correct. In a series of experiments, he and his colleagues found 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.