Hughes and Miller have collected additional information linking sensory experiences. They learned that among study their participants, “There was an overall tendency to associate attractive voices with attractive faces and unattractive voices with unattractive faces, suggesting that a ‘what-sounds-beautiful-looks-beautiful’ stereotype exists. Interestingly, there was an even stronger propensity to pair unattractive voices to unattractive faces than for the attractive voice-face matching.” These findings are consistent with relationships identified regularly by design, physical and social science researchers investigating design experiences and user responses to them; material gathered via one sensory channel often affects judgments of data collected through another.
Susan Hughes and Noelle Miller. “What Sounds Beautiful Looks Beautiful Stereotype: The Matching of Attractiveness of Voices and Faces.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, in press.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.