Watching the goofy videos you recorded is all fun and games until you hear the playback of your voice.
“When you hear your own recording, people are often vexed by it,” says Susan Hughes, an evolutionary psychologist at Albright College. “They don't like the way it sounds — they think they sound high pitched or just awkward.” This phenomenon is something psychologists have wondered about for decades, even if it hasn’t gotten a lot of research attention.
In a classic 1966 study, a research team recorded study participants as they described their job and then played back the audio or another clip of someone else discussing their work. When participants heard themselves, their reactions ran from grimaces to surprise (“holy man,” one subject said). Conducted 47 years later, Hughes’ research indicates that our supposed dislike of our own voices might be more based in surprise than actual aversion.
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