Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This study was the first to examine whether the volume of one's voice serves as an embodied cue for assessing information credibility. Eighty U.S. undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: loud, soft, or control. They read aloud in their assigned loudness condition while rating the truthfulness of trivia statements, followed by silently rating additional statements. The results revealed no significant effect of voice loudness on truthfulness ratings. When examining confidence levels reflected in the ratings, an interaction effect between reading status and loudness condition emerged. Participants who controlled their volume (either loud or soft) rated statements with higher confidence compared to when rating statements silently. These findings suggest that speakers do not associate their own voice loudness with the truthfulness of information.