Personally, I’m not a fan of either, so it’s always been a little interesting to me to run into people that are more averse to hearing a recording of their voice.
(Also is there a dedicated term for audio-only voice recordings? 🤨)
People see themselves in the mirror pretty often, so they have a general idea of how they appear to other people. But they don’t hear their own voice regularly unless they record themselves and listen to it, so it’s more of a surprise when they do hear their own voice.
I think you have this flipped, though. It’s more like we hear ourselves all the time, but we don’t sound at all to ourselves the way we actually sound. We don’t have a sort of internal picture of ourselves to create dissonance with our reflection or photographs in the same way we do with our voices. It’s that dissonance that makes us distrust or dislike hearing ourselves as we actually sound because that isn’t the voice we identify with internally.
I think this is changing and would change more in thw future. I’m not a fan of voice messages, but my wife and her sisters never “chat” they just send audio messages on whatsapp all the time and, at least my wife, listen to the messages she send multiple times. I don’t think she’s the only one who does that.
Your voice resonates through your bones and sounds very different to you personally. So when you hear a recording it is a different voice than you’re used to hearing.
A photo is a photo, you know what you look like. Some people just don’t like having photos taken. The way some people don’t really look in the mirror that much.
Photos don’t convey intelligence, while speech does.
I’d guess lack of familiarity. Your voice sounds different than what you hear in your head so a recording can seem very strange, whereas seeing a picture or reflection is much more frequent for many people.
Yeah, growing up before digital photography was common, loads of people hated how they looked in photographs. When you only saw a couple of photos of yourself in a year, it was really easy to be horrified and ask “is that really what I look like”. Now you can take ten selfies in a row and you know that how you look varies massively depending on the angle or lighting. And anyone who has to regularly work with their own recorded voice generally gets over the cringe pretty quickly.
I suspect it’s because we see accurate representations of ourselves in every mirror. With voice though what we hear normally is distorted by the resonence of our jawbone, so hearing the version everyone else does when it’s played back from a recording is alien and weird.
Might make for an interesting experiment to take picture of someone in a mirror and through the mirror (pinhole or two-way mirror) and then ask people which of the two is real and which is the doctored one. Neither are edited of course but one would look wrong for anyone who met the person in the photos.
I suspect this is basically it, however I’ve often thought similar could be said of one’s appearance; as it’s distorted by different lighting, whether your clothing’s gotten wrinkled up a certain way, the wind’s messed up your hair, or you accidentally smudged makeup or some dirt on you somewhere. Although that all is also typically easier to adjust (give or take the lighting and wind) than your voice, so that undoubtedly plays into it.