Gender-Ambiguous Voices and Social Disfluency

with Kurt Munz (Bocconi University)

• Published in Psychological Science (2024) 

• 2021 Bocconi Junior Research Grant 

• Link to Journal | Open Science 

• Honorable mention by the Psychology of Technology dissertation award (2024) | Link 

• Presented at ACR (2023), EACR (2023), SJDM (2022)

• Media coverage:  Il Sole 24 Ore

Recently, gender-ambiguous (non-binary) voices have been added to voice assistants to combat gender stereotypes and foster inclusion. However, if people react negatively to such voices, these laudable efforts may be counterproductive. In five preregistered studies (N = 3,684) we find that people do react negatively, rating products described by narrators with gender-ambiguous voices less favorably than when they are described by clearly male or female narrators. This is due to the voices creating a feeling of unease related to difficulty understanding the gender of the narrator, what we call social disfluency, that spills over to affect evaluations of the products being described. These effects are best explained by low familiarity with voices that sound ambiguous. Thus, initial negative reactions can be overcome with more exposure.

ADVANCED R&R

Perceptual Disfluency Affects Consumer Choices

with Kurt Munz (Bocconi University)

• Invited for 3rd round review at Journal of Consumer Research 

• Presented at EMAC (2025), ANZMAC (2024), CB Symposium (2022)

• Best Presentation Award at 8th Mediterranean Symposium for Consumer Behavior Research Conference, ie Business School (2022)

Marketing materials often create difficulties for consumers through elements like unconventional fonts or distracting background images, leading to perceptual disfluency—a feeling of difficulty encoding information. Scholars disagree as to whether perceptual disfluency prompts consumers to think more carefully and analytically or to resort to simpler, intuitive-based decision-making strategies. Ten preregistered experiments (N = 7,226) show that perceptual disfluency reduces depth of processing during consumer choices. As a consequence, consumers rely more on salient and easily comprehended cues like a brand, a recommendation, or the country of origin (i.e., those attributes that don't need depth processing, as they themselves can shape our evaluations independently) when experiencing disfluency, results that meaningfully advance past research. This research also helps to explain why previous research showed mixed results, noting that perceptual disfluency impacts consumer choices differently than tasks with objective answers.

SELECTED ONGOING PROJECTS

KFC or Kentucky Fried Chicken: Consumer Support for Abbreviated Brand Names

with Kurt Munz (Bocconi University)

• Manuscript in preparation for submission to Journal of Marketing 

Historical Price Fluctuation and Purchase Decision: The Role of Our Perception 

with Kurt Munz (Bocconi University) and Hean Tat Keh (Monash University)

• Data collection in progress 

"Textism": A Tool to Automatically Identify Teextisms in Big Text Data

with Amir Sepehri (ESSEC Business School)

• Data collection in progress 

Numerical Online Reviews 

with Alex Belli (Melbourne University) and Sepehr Safari (Emlyon Business School) 

• Data collection in progress 

CONFERENCES AND TALKS

Perceptual Disfluency Affects Consumer Choices 

• European Marketing Academy Conference, Madrid, Spain (2025)

• Australian & New Zealand Marketing Academy, University of Tasmania, Australia (2024)

• Melbourne School of Business and Economics, Melbourne University, Australia  (2024) 

• AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium, Manchester Business School, UK (2024) 

• Adelaide Business School, Adelaide University, Australia  (2023)

• 8th Mediterranean Symposium for Consumer Behavior Research Conference,  IE Business School, Spain (2022)

Gender-Ambiguous Voices and Social Disfluency

• Association of Consumer Research (ACR) Annual Conference, Seattle, USA (2023) (Presented by Kurt Munz)

• European Association of Consumer Research (EACR) Annual Conference, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2023) (Presented by Kurt Munz)

• Society for Judgment and Decision-Making (SJDM) Annual Conference, Poster presentation (2022, online)

Historical Price Fluctuation and Purchase Decision: The Role of Our Perception 

• Monash Business School, Australia (2023)

HONORS AND AWARDS