In recent years, digital voice assistants have begun to diversify. In a bid to break from gender stereotypes, Apple introduced a new Siri voice in 2022 that didn’t sound clearly male or female. This move was praised for promoting inclusivity and challenging the norm of female-voiced, subservient AI. But it also raised an important question: how do people react when they hear a voice they can’t easily categorize by gender?
A new study by Shahryar Mohsenin and Kurt P. Munz, published in Psychological Science, reveals that people may react negatively to gender-ambiguous voices—not because of prejudice, but due to a phenomenon the authors call “social disfluency.” Drawing on a series of five preregistered experiments involving over 3,600 participants, the researchers explored how unfamiliar or hard-to-categorize voices influence how we judge the content those voices convey.
What Is Social Disfluency?
Social disfluency refers to the mental discomfort people experience when they can’t quickly interpret social information, such as the gender of a speaker. Just as people find unfamiliar fonts or poor audio quality harder to process—and often rate the associated messages less favorably—voices that are difficult to categorize can similarly disrupt fluency. In this case, it’s not the message itself that’s unclear, but the social signal embedded in the voice.
In the experiments, participants listened to descriptions of consumer products—like toothpaste, coffee, and detergent—narrated either by a clearly male or female voice, or by a gender-ambiguous one. Across multiple product categories and voice samples, the results were consistent: people rated the products less favorably when they were described by a gender-ambiguous voice.
Is Prejudice the Cause?
To probe whether this negative effect stemmed from underlying prejudice against LGBTQ individuals, the researchers included explicit measures of bias and manipulated the perceived gender of the speaker using names (e.g., labeling the speaker “David”). Surprisingly, giving a gender-ambiguous voice a traditionally male name didn’t reduce negative reactions—it sometimes even worsened them. And importantly, measures of prejudice didn’t predict how people responded to the voices.
This suggested that the problem wasn’t bias per se, but rather low familiarity. People simply aren’t used to hearing gender-ambiguous voices. As a result, the discomfort arises from unfamiliarity and difficulty processing the voice socially—not from hostility.
Can Familiarity Reduce the Negative Effect?
In their final study, Mohsenin and Munz tested whether increasing exposure to a gender-ambiguous voice could reduce disfluency. Half the participants heard the study’s instructions read in a gender-ambiguous voice before hearing the same voice describe products. The result? The negative effect disappeared. Familiarity, it turns out, is a powerful antidote to social disfluency.
Why This Matters
These findings offer a psychological explanation for why innovations like gender-ambiguous voice assistants may not be immediately embraced—and how that resistance can be overcome. As society moves toward more inclusive representations in technology and media, exposure and normalization are crucial. Just as people came to accept various accents and speech patterns in broadcast media, they may grow more comfortable with gender-ambiguous voices as those voices become more common.
The study also offers broader insight into how subtle signals in our social environment shape judgment. Even when the message is clear, the speaker’s voice can shift how we feel about what’s being said—especially when the speaker doesn’t fit into familiar categories.
In short, inclusion isn’t just about representation—it’s also about repetition. The more we hear voices that defy traditional labels, the more natural and trustworthy they become. And in time, what once felt unfamiliar may become the new norm.