Conceptual beliefs shape first impressions from voices

When we hear a voice, we almost instantly form an impression of the speaker’s personality and characteristics. Previous work has primarily modelled first impression formation as a bottom-up, feed-forward process, where acoustic cues drive how different person characteristics, such as trustworthiness or competence, are perceived from unfamiliar voices. Contributions from top-down processes to impression formation, such as the influences of social stereotypes and other conceptual beliefs, have to date received less attention in voice research. Here, we quantify such top-down contributions by mapping representational spaces for (1) first impression judgments from voices and (2) conceptual beliefs about person characteristics in other people in a behavioural study. Using Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA), we observe substantial structural similarities between these spaces. This suggests that vocal impressions are thus substantially shaped by conceptual beliefs, which challenges the prevailing narrative of primarily bottom-up acoustic processing shaping impressions. This effect generalises across voice types (e.g., typical, AI-generated, pathological voices), listener samples, and even across modalities to facial impressions. Aligning with recent theoretical advances in social psychology, our findings thus call for vocal impression research to start to explicitly model and explore the interplay between top-down and bottom-up processes.