Investing in accents: How does experience mediate trust attributions to different voices?

Speakers’ accents have been claimed to influence initial judgements of personality traits, such as trustworthiness. We examined how personal experience with specific accents may serve to modify initial trust attributions, using an iterated trust game in which participants make investments with virtual players. The virtual player’s accent was either Liverpool English or Standard Southern British English (SSBE), and they systematically returned investments either generously or meanly. When the virtual player was generous, participants consistently invested more with the SSBE-accented player throughout the game. When the virtual player was mean, participants initially invested more with SSBE, but after a few rounds the pattern reversed, and they subsequently invested more with the Liverpool-accented player, even though the pattern of investment returns between accents was the same. This interaction suggests that initial voice-based personality attributions may mediate the interpretation of a speaker’s subsequent behaviour.