Both personal and shared taste shape impressions from voices and faces

Voices elicit rich first impressions of what the person we are hearing might be like. Research stresses that these impressions from voices are shared across different listeners, such that people on average agree which voices sound trustworthy or old and which do not. However, can impressions from voices also shaped by the ‘ear of the beholder’? We for the first time investigated whether - and how - listeners’ idiosyncratic, personal preferences contribute to first impressions from voices. In two studies (993 participants, 156 voices), we find evidence for substantial contributions of personal taste to voice impressions using a variance portioning approach. Overall, personal taste often contributes as much as shared taste to impressions from voices for social and trait characteristics (e.g., trustworthiness, friendliness). Shared taste is only more influential for impressions of physical characteristics (e.g., gender, age). Contributions of both personal and shared taste were reduced when stimuli were limited in their (perceived) variability, suggesting that natural variation in voices is key to understanding this impression formation. When comparing voice impressions to face impressions, we show that personal and shared taste contribute similarly across modality when stimulus properties are closely matched - although voice impressions were overall less consistent than face impressions. We thus reconceptualise impressions from voices as being formed not only based on shared but also personal taste. We use this new framing to suggest future directions of research, including understanding idiosyncratic mechanisms, development, and malleability of voice impression formation.