Excerpt

The natural audio presentation of natural language has many sources of variance beyond simply the choice of words. Characteristics of a speech act such as pitch, diction, and intonation may be significant, even though they do not affect the semantic content of what has been spoken. There is a significant body of scholarship that examines this type of speech variation, e.g., in mate selection, leader selection, housing choices, consumer purchases, and even stock market outcomes (Nass and Lee 2001; Klofstad, Anderson, and Peters 2012; Purnell, Idsardi, and Baugh 1999; Scherer 1979; Tigue et al. 2012; Mayew and Venkatachalam 2012), but there is relatively little quantitative empirical evidence that speech variation beyond lexical choices matters for realworld behavior. Speech variation from identical utterances of “Hello” affect personality ratings (McAleer, Todorov, and Belin 2014), but linking these ratings to downstream behavior is challenging. Nevertheless, oral advocacy classes are taught at law schools, and skilled oral advocacy is a highly sought-after professional trait (Korn 2004).

In this chapter, we take up the question of the practical relevance of speech variation by examining whether specific vocal cues in the first three seconds of speech are predictive in high-stakes policymaking settings, such as the US Supreme Court.

There are many reasons to think that vocal first impressions should not matter very much. From the perspective of a purely rational judicial decision-maker, only the information content of a speech act should count (Posner 1973). Unless vocal characteristics carry useful information, they should be ignored. Under the attitudinal model of judging, judicial decision-making is understood as largely political, with outcomes determined by judicial attributes (Cameron 1993). Something as seemingly insignificant as vocal characteristics should not be enough to overwhelm a judge’s ideological dispositions. Alternatively, under a legal model, judges would focus on the legal content of the arguments presented by litigants (Kornhauser 2012). Vocal style would again seem to be irrelevant.

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