Increasingly, scientific communications are recorded and made available online. While researchers carefully draft the words they use, the quality of the recording is at the mercy of technical staff. Does it make a difference?
We presented identical conference talks (Experiment 1) [n = 97 / k = 2] and radio interviews from NPR’s Science Friday (Experiment 2) [n = 99 / k = 2] in high or low audio quality and asked people to evaluate the researcher and the research they presented.
Despite identical content, people evaluated the research and researcher less favorably when the audio quality was low, suggesting that audio quality can influence impressions of science.
Figure 1: The top panel displays mean ratings of the talk and researcher by audio quality (High vs. Low). The lower panel displays these same means split by video. This lower panel is a between-subject comparison; participants either saw the High Quality Audio Physics Talk + Low Quality Audio Engineering Talk or the Low Quality Audio Physics Talk + High Quality Audio Engineering Talk. Note that error bars represent 1 SE.
Figure 2: The top panel displays mean ratings of the research and researcher by audio quality (High Quality vs. Low Quality). The lower panel displays these same means split by interview. This lower panel is a between-subjects comparison; participants either saw the High Quality Audio Physics Interview + Low Quality Audio Genetics Interview or the Low Quality Audio Physics Interview + High Quality Audio Genetics Interview. Note that error bars represent 1 SE.
