Multimodal Cues to Change Your Mind: The Intertwining of Faces, Voices, and Behaviors in Impression Updating

Abstract

Impressions of others are formed from multiple cues, including facial features, vocal tone, and behavioral descriptions, and may be subject to multimodal updating. Four experiments ( N = 803) examined the influence of a target’s face or voice on impression updating. Experiments 1a-1b examined whether behavior-based impressions are susceptible to updating by incongruent information conveyed by the target’s face, voice, or behavior (within-participant manipulation). Both faces and voices updated impressions with comparable strength, but less than behaviors. Experiment 2, contrasting faces and voices only (between-participants manipulation), showed that voices outperformed faces regardless of how impressions were formed (i.e., via behavioral vs. nonbehavioral information). Experiment 3 found no difference when comparing faces and voices in a within-participant design and controlling for stimulus attractiveness. Our work highlights the importance of multimodal cues for impression updating and shows that the relative power of faces and voices depends on contextual factors.