Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Language and Pop Culture
Vol. 1:2 (2025) ► pp.248–275

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Good and evil in the voices of fictional characters

A perception study

ORCiD logo with link | Aarhus University
 | Aarhus University
 | Aarhus University
 | Aarhus University
Published online: 16 May 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlpop.24025.kje
Abstract
This article examines whether audiences ascribe moral qualities to fictional characters based on the sound of their voices. We first review psychological and sociocultural mechanisms whereby a character’s voice may be heard as morally diagnostic. Presented next is an online perception study in which 250 participants rated the moral qualities of 22 fictional characters following brief exposure to their voices. The voice clips, all of which were performed by the same professional voice actor, were extracted from “actual-play” sessions of Dungeons & Dragons. Participants came mainly from Europe and North America and had different degrees of familiarity with the fictional source materials. Our results indicated general agreement among participants in their assignment of moral qualities to the different characters. While characters with clear, resonant, and otherwise unexceptionable voices were perceived as mostly good, characters with harsh, whispery, and otherwise “othering” voices were often perceived as evil.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Voices, vices, and virtues: An overview
  • 3.Methods
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1General results
    • 4.2Results across participant groups
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Moral perceptions
    • 5.2Moral agreement
    • 5.3Moral perceptions and character roles
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Statements and declarations
    • Ethical considerations
    • Consent to participate
    • Consent for publication
    • Data availability statement
  • Notes
  • References
References (52)
References
Akita, K. (2021). Phonation types matter in sound symbolism. Cognitive Science, 45(5), e12982. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boyd, Z., & Hejná, M. (Forthcoming). The “Critical Role” of acoustic and auditory methods in holistic studies of voice quality: A case study of non-player characters in Dungeons & Dragons voiced by Matthew Mercer. Language in Society.
Brons, L. L. (2015). Othering, an analysis. Transcience, a Journal of Global Studies, 6(1), 69–90. [URL]
Carroll, J. (2005). Aestheticism, homoeroticism, and Christian guilt in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Philosophy and Literature, 29(2), 286–304. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carroll, N. (2010). Movies, the moral emotions, and sympathy. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 34(1), 1–19. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cogburn, J., & Silcox, M. (Eds.). (2012). Dungeons & Dragons and philosophy: Raiding the temple of wisdom. Open Court.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Crochiquia, A., Eriksson, A., Barbosa, P., & Madureira, S. (2022). A perceptual and acoustic study of dubbed voices in an animated film. In S. Frota, M. Cruz, & M. Vigário (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of Speech Prosody (pp. 565–569). ISCA. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Esling, J. H., Moisik, S. R., Benner, A., & Crevier-Buchman, L. (2019). Voice quality: The Laryngeal Articulator Model. Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Evil Sounds Deep. (n.d.). TV Tropes. Retrieved June 12, 2024, from [URL]
Gilchrist, T. (2005, October 12). Interview: Ian McDiarmid. IGN. [URL]
Gluszek, A., & Dovidio, J. F. (2010). Speaking with a nonnative accent: Perceptions of bias, communication difficulties, and belonging in the United States. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 29(2), 224–234. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gobl, C., & Chasaide, A. N. (2003). The role of voice quality in communicating emotion, mood and attitude. Speech Communication, 40(1–2), 189–212. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goorimoorthee, T., Csipo, A., Carleton, S., & Ensslin, A. (2019). Language ideologies in videogame discourse: Forms of sociophonetic othering in accented character speech. In A. Ensslin & I. Balteiro (Eds.), Approaches to videogame discourse: Lexis, interaction, textuality (pp. 269–287). Bloomsbury. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gottschall, J., Callanan, C., Casamento, N., Gladd, N., Manganini, K., Milan-Robertson, T., O’Connell, P., Parker, K., Riley, N., Stucker, V., Tapply, A., Wall, C., & Webb, A. (2007). Are the beautiful good in Western literature? A simple illustration of the necessity of literary quantification. Journal of Literary Studies, 23(1), 41–62. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Grizzard, M., Huang, J., Fitzgerald, K., Ahn, C., & Chu, H. (2018). Sensing heroes and villains: Character-schema and the disposition formation process. Communication Research, 45(4), 479–501. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harper, T. (2011). Rules, rhetoric, and genre: Procedural rhetoric in Persona 3. Games and Culture, 6(5), 395–413. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hendricks, S. Q. (2006). Incorporative discourse strategies in tabletop fantasy role-playing gaming. In J. P. Williams, S. Q. Hendricks, & W. K. Winkler (Eds.), Gaming as culture: Essays on reality, identity and experience in fantasy games (pp. 39–56). McFarland.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ilieva, A. (2023). Cultural languages of role-playing. International Journal of Role-Playing, 41, 26–38. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kinzler, K. D. (2020). How you say it: Why you talk the way you do and what it says about you. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., Boyd, Z., & Hejná, M. (2024). Teaching children to discriminate? A quantitative study of linguistic representation in Disney’s “Revival Era” animated films. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, 40(76), 181–202. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., Boyd, Z., Hejná, M., & Eaton, M. Ø. (2025). Characters, voices, and moralities [dataset]. Open Science Framework. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Clasen, M. (2023). Creepiness and the uncanny. Style, 57(3), 322–349. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., Hejná, M., Clasen, M., & Eaton, M. (2023). Evil voices in popular fictions: The case of The Exorcist. The Journal of Popular Culture, 56(2), 226–247. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Schmidt, S. H. (2019). Disney’s shifting visions of villainy from the 1990s to the 2010s: A biocultural analysis. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 3(2), 1–16. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lippi-Green, R. (2012). English with an accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States. Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ley, M. B. (In progress). Linguistic profiling in the world of Exandria: An examination of Critical Role’s Matt Mercer’s accents.
Li-Vollmer, M., & LaPointe, M. E. (2003). Gender transgression and villainy in animated film. Popular Communication, 1(2), 89–109. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mooshammer, C., Bobeck, D., Hornecker, H., Meinhardt, K., Olina, O., Walch, M. C., & Xia, Q. (2024). Does Orkish sound evil? Perception of fantasy languages and their phonetic and phonological characteristics. Language and Speech, 67(4), 961–1000. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nuckolls, J. B. (1999). The case for sound symbolism. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28(1), 225–252. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
O’Connor, J. J. M., & Barclay, P. (2017). The influence of voice pitch on perceptions of trustworthiness across social contexts. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38(4), 506–512. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ohala, J. J. (1983). Cross-language use of pitch: An ethological view. Phonetica, 40(1), 1–18. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pradantyo, R., Birk, M. V., & Bateman, S. (2021). How the visual design of video game antagonists affects perception of morality. Frontiers in Computer Science, 31, 531713. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Purnell, T., Idsardi, W., & Baugh, J. (1999). Perceptual and phonetic experiments on American English dialect identification. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 18(1), 10–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Qualtrics. (2023). Qualtrics [Computer software]. [URL]
Sawyer, J., Chon, H. C., & Ambrose, N. G. (2008). Influences of rate, length, and complexity on speech disfluency in a single-speech sample in pre-school children who stutter. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 33(3), 220–240. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Scherer, K. R. (1978). Personality inference from voice quality: The loud voice of extroversion. European Journal of Social Psychology, 8(4), 467–487. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
(1995). Expression of emotion in voice and music. Journal of Voice, 9(3), 235–248. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sherman, G. D., Haidt, J., & Coan, J. A. (2009). Viewing cute images increases behavioral carefulness. Emotion, 9(2), 282–286. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stein, S. D. (2023). Space rednecks, robot butlers, and feline foreigners: Language attitudes toward varieties of English in videogames. Games and Culture, 18(8), 1043–1070. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stevenson, R. L. (1886). The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Longmans, Green, and Co.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Teshigawara, M. (2003a). Voices in Japanese animation: A phonetic study of vocal stereotypes of heroes and villains in Japanese culture (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Victoria. [URL]
(2003b). Voices in Japanese animation: How people perceive the voices of good guys and bad guys. Working Papers of the Linguistics Circle, 171, 149–158. [URL]
Teshigawara, M., Amir, N., Amir, O., Wlosko, E. M., & Avivi, M. (2009). Perceptions of Japanese anime voices by Hebrew speakers. In K. Izdebski (Ed.), Emotions in the human voice, Volume III1: Culture and perception (pp. 177–186). Plural Publishing.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Teshigawara, M., & Murano, E. Z. (2004). Articulatory correlates of voice qualities of good guys and bad guys in Japanese anime: An MRI study. In S. H. Kim & D. H. Yun (Eds.), Proceedings of Interspeech 2004 (pp. 1249–1252). ISCA. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tong, K. H., & Moisik, S. R. (2021). Detecting protagonists and antagonists in the voice quality of American cartoon characters: A quantitative LTAS-based analysis. Phonetica, 78(4), 345–384. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tsai, C.-G., Wang, L.-C., Wang, S.-F., Shau, Y.-W., Hsiao, T.-Y., & Auhagen, W. (2010). Aggressiveness of the growl-like timbre: Acoustic characteristics, musical implications, and biomechanical mechanisms. Music Perception, 27(3), 209–222. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Turner, M. (2011). Black sheriffs and villains in white hats: The image of the hero in Western parodies. American, British, and Canadian Studies, 171, 48–66.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Upton, B. (2014). Hollywood and the end of the Cold War: Signs of cinematic change. Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Väyrynen, P. (2021). Thick ethical concepts. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [URL]
Walther, K. B., & Larsen, J. L. (2023). The Orc — playing the “wholly other”: Investigations of Kant’s sublime and the technological sublime in Blizzard Entertainment’s massive multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Games and Culture, 18(7), 868–888. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zagal, J. P., & Deterding, S. (Eds.). (2018). Role-playing game studies: Transmedia foundations. Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue