The peril of sounding manly: A look at vocal characteristics of lawyers before the United States Supreme Court
Conference on Laboratory Phonology
Venue: LabPhon
Type: Abstract
Phonology
Authors
Affiliations
Alan C. L. Yu
University of Chicago
Daniel Chen
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
Katie Franich
University of Chicago
Jacob Phillips
University of Chicago
Betsy Pillion
University of Chicago
Sophie Hao
University of Chicago
Zhigang Yin
University of Chicago
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Published
July 27, 2014
Abstract
Individuals make use of many aspects of the speech signals to construct personas and to project hidden desires to the external world. Of interest here is whether vocal characteristics and the perceptual evaluation of them exert an influence on listener behavior. With the exception of a few pioneering studies (e.g., Purnell et al. 1999), this question has remained largely unexplored. In the present study, we examine the vocal characteristics of lawyers arguing in front of the Supreme Court of the United States and link this data to the lawyers’ actual win rates in the Court. We show that perceived attributes of voices predict Supreme Court wins, suggesting potential differential labor market treatment of lawyers with certain mutable characteristics such as sounding more or less masculine or confident.