Does the quality of your microphone affect how others perceive you? Experimental design practice
During the COVID lockdown, Yale psychological scientist Brian Scholl “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” (Nuwer, 2025, p. 18). After the meeting, it occurred to Scholl that his close collaborator “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 home-recording studio” (Nuwer, 2025, p. 18). Could audio quality affect our perceptions of others?
Give your students this scenario.
You have a big job interview coming up. It is going to be held on Zoom. For your classes that are held using web conferencing apps, you’ve been using your laptop’s built-in microphone. It doesn’t sound very good, but it gets the job done. For this interview—and potentially other interviews—is it worth paying for a higher quality mic?
Researchers wondered the same thing. Could the quality of our microphones affect how other people perceive us?
Ask students to work in small groups to design a study that would test this. First, students need to decide on their dependent variable(s). What kinds of perceptions do they think might be influenced by mic quality? And then they need to create operational definitions for each dependent variable.
Next, their independent variable will be microphone quality. Students need to decide what levels they will have for their independent variable and the operational definitions for each level.
After the discussion has died down, invite volunteers from each group to share their experimental designs.
Next, share with students this open-access study conducted by researchers at Yale and the University of British Columbia (Walter-Terrill et al., 2025). Researchers randomly assigned volunteers to hear either a clear recording made with a high-quality mic or a distorted recording. The recording was the same one. For the distorted version, the researchers manipulated the clear recording to emulate poor mic quality without compromising comprehension. (Download the clear and distorted recordings.) For this study, the dependent variable was hireability: “What is the likelihood that you would hire this person?” (Walter-Terrill et al., 2025, p. 5). The volunteers were shown a bar and were asked to use a mouse to slide a marker on a scale that was anchored on either end with “Very Unlikely” (0) and “Very Likely” (100). The volunteers who heard a clear recording rated their likelihood of hiring, on average, at 76. Those who heard the distorted recording rated the person’s hireability at 68.5.
The researchers went on to do additional studies that evaluated audio quality on judgments of romantic desirability, credibility, and intelligence. In all cases, the clear recording was rated higher than the distorted recording (Walter-Terrill et al., 2025).
If time allows, ask students, based on this research, if they think the quality of the instructor’s microphone could affect student perceptions of instructors? Or could the quality of a student’s microphone affect instructor perceptions of a student? Do you have any students who might be interested in taking on either or both research projects?
References
Nuwer, R. (2025). Mic drop. Scientific American, 333(1), 18–19. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican072025-OLZyx4Fhf28IWyWOQWuMi
Walter-Terrill, R., Ongchoco, J. D. K., & Scholl, B. J. (2025). Superficial auditory (dis)fluency biases higher-level social judgment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(13), e2415254122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2415254122