It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, January 17, 2025
The megadroughts are upon us
Forty-year study: Extreme droughts will become more frequent, severe, and extensive
Institute of Science and Technology Austria
image:
The Yeso reservoir in central Chile during a megadrought peak in Summer 2020.
Increasingly common since 1980, persistent multi-year droughts will continue to advance with the warming climate, warns a study from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL), with Professor Francesca Pellicciotti from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) participating. This publicly available forty-year global quantitative inventory, now published in Science, seeks to inform policy regarding the environmental impact of human-induced climate change. It also detected previously ‘overlooked’ events.
Fifteen years of a persistent, devastating megadrought—the longest lasting in a thousand years—have nearly dried out Chile’s water reserves, even affecting the country’s vital mining output. This is but one blatant example of how the warming climate is causing multi-year droughts and acute water crises in vulnerable regions around the globe. However, droughts tend only to be noticed when they damage agriculture or visibly affect forests. Thus, some pressing questions arise: Can we consistently identify extreme multi-year droughts and examine their impacts on ecosystems? And what can we learn from the drought patterns of the past forty years?
To answer these questions, researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL) and the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have analyzed global meteorological data and modeled droughts between 1980 and 2018. They demonstrated a worrying increase in multi-year droughts that became longer, more frequent, and more extreme, covering more land. “Each year since 1980, drought-stricken areas have spread by an additional fifty thousand square kilometers on average—that’s roughly the area of Slovakia, or the US states of Vermont and New Hampshire put together—, causing enormous damage to ecosystems, agriculture, and energy production,” says ISTA Professor Francesca Pellicciotti, the Principal Investigator of the WSL-funded EMERGE Project, under which the present study was conducted. The team aims to unveil the possible long-lasting effects of persistent droughts around the globe and help inform policy preparing for more frequent and severe future megadroughts.
Unveiling extreme droughts that flew under the radar
The international team used the CHELSA climate data prepared by WSL Senior Researcher and study author Dirk Karger, which goes back to 1979. They calculated anomalies in rainfall and evapotranspiration—water evaporation from soil and plants—and their impact on natural ecosystems worldwide. This allowed them to determine the occurrence of multi-year droughts both in well-studied and less accessible regions of the planet, especially in areas like tropical forests and the Andes, where little observational data is available. “Our method not only mapped well-documented droughts but also shed light on extreme droughts that flew under the radar, such as the one that affected the Congo rainforest from 2010 to 2018,” says Karger. This discrepancy is likely due to how forests in various climate regions respond to drought episodes. “While temperate grasslands have been most affected in the past forty years, boreal and tropical forests appeared to withstand drought more effectively and even displayed paradoxical effects during the onset of drought.” But how long can these forests resist the harsh blow of climate change?
Contrasting impacts on ecosystems
The persistently rising temperatures, extended droughts, and higher evapotranspiration ultimately lead to dryer and browner ecosystems, despite also causing heavier precipitation episodes. Thus, scientists can use satellite images to monitor the effect of drought by tracking changes in vegetation greenness over time. While this analysis works well for temperate grasslands, the changes in greenness cannot be tracked as easily over dense tropical forest canopies, leading to underestimated effects of drought in such areas. Thus, to ensure consistent results worldwide, the team developed a multistep analysis that better resolves the changes in high-leaf regions and ranked the droughts by their severity since 1980. Unsurprisingly, they showed that megadroughts had the highest immediate impact on temperate grasslands. ‘Hotspot’ regions included the western USA, central and eastern Mongolia, and particularly southeastern Australia, where the data overlapped with two well-documented multi-year ecological droughts. On the other hand, the team shed additional light on the paradoxical effects observed in the tropical and boreal forests. While tropical forests can offset the expected effects of drought as long as they have enough water reserves to buffer the decrease in rainfall, boreal forests and tundra react in their distinct way. It turns out that the warming climate extends the boreal growth season since vegetation growth in these regions is limited by lower temperatures rather than water availability.
Droughts evolve in time and space
The results show that the trend of intensifying megadroughts is clear: The team generated the first global—and globally consistent—picture of megadroughts and their impact on vegetation at high resolution. However, the long-term effects on the planet and its ecosystems remain largely unknown. Meanwhile, the data already agrees with the observed widely greening pan-Arctic. “But in the event of long-term extreme water shortages, trees in tropical and boreal regions can die, leading to long-lasting damage to these ecosystems. Especially, the boreal vegetation will likely take the longest to recover from such a climate disaster,” says Karger. Pellicciotti hopes the team’s result will help change our perception of droughts and how to prepare for them: “Currently, mitigation strategies largely consider droughts as yearly or seasonal events, which stands in stark contrast to the longer and more severe megadroughts we will face in the future,” she says. “We hope that the publicly available inventory of droughts we are putting out will help orient policymakers toward more realistic preparation and prevention measures.” As a glaciologist, Pellicciotti also seeks to examine the effects of megadroughts in the mountains and how glaciers can buffer them. She leads a collaborative project titled “MegaWat—Megadroughts in the Water Towers of Europe—From Process Understanding to Strategies for Management and Adaptation.”
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Project and funding information The present study was conducted within the scope of the EMERGE Project of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research (WSL) with Professor Francesca Pellicciotti from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) serving as its Principal Investigator. The research was supported by funding from the Extreme Program of the WSL for the EMERGE project.
The Yeso reservoir in central Chile during a megadrought peak in Summer 2020.
Drone Video from Chile, 2017.The Upper Rio Yeso catchment: a tributary to the Maipo River which serves the Chilean capital, Santiago.
The Yeso region in Central Chile, visibly dry during a peak of the megadrought in the Summer of 2020Facebook
Dead vines in the region around Los Andes in the western catchment area of Aconcagua, a region that has been particularly hard hit by the ongoing drought in Chile.
Global increase in the occurrence and impact of multiyear droughts
Article Publication Date
17-Jan-2025
Multiyear “megadroughts” becoming longer and more severe under climate change
Summary author: Walter Beckwith
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Severe droughts are becoming hotter, longer, and increasingly devastating to ecosystems as climate change accelerates, according to a new study, which reports that temperate grasslands, including in parts of the United States, are facing the worst effects. The findings provide a global quantitative understanding of multiyear droughts (MYDs) – prolonged events lasting years or decades – and offer a benchmark for understanding their global trends and impacts. As droughts become more frequent worldwide, the likelihood of MYDs rises, posing severe threats to both natural ecosystems and human systems. These events deplete soil moisture and reduce streamflow, potentially causing irreversible damage, with consequences that include widespread crop failures, increased tree mortality, diminished ecosystem productivity, and reduced water supplies. Recent MYDs, like the Western U.S. drought (2000–2018) and Chile's ongoing drought (since 2010), have drawn significant concern due to their devastating impacts. However, less prominent MYDs, with fewer perceived consequences, may have gone unnoticed, highlighting the need for comprehensive knowledge of their occurrence and effects. To address this need, Liangzhi Chen and colleagues mapped the global distribution of 13,176 MYDs from 1980 to 2018 using the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI), which measures drought severity based on the balance between precipitation and potential evaporative demand. Chen et al. also assessed these events’ impacts on vegetation through remotely sensed greenness data. The findings show that over the last 40 years, MYDs have occurred on nearly every continent and have become increasingly widespread, hotter, and drier, with global land affected by these events increasing by 49,279 ±14,771 square kilometers annually. What’s more, the authors report that the ecosystem impacts of MYDs varied significantly, with temperate grasslands exhibiting greater declines in greenness compared to subtropical and tropical forests. While grasslands demonstrated low resistance to drought, they often displayed rapid recovery following drought events, highlighting their unique resilience dynamics. In a related Perspective, David Hoover and William Smith discuss the study and its findings in greater detail.
In a recently published paper, NASA scientists use nearly 20 years of observations to show that the global water cycle is shifting in unprecedented ways. The majority of those shifts are driven by activities such as agriculture and could have impacts on ecosystems and water management, especially in certain regions.
“We established with data assimilation that human intervention in the global water cycle is more significant than we thought,” said Sujay Kumar, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-author of the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The shifts have implications for people all over the world. Water management practices, such as designing infrastructure for floods or developing drought indicators for early warning systems, are often based on assumptions that the water cycle fluctuates only within a certain range, said Wanshu Nie, a research scientist at NASA Goddard and lead author of the paper.
“This may no longer hold true for some regions,” Nie said. “We hope that this research will serve as a guide map for improving how we assess water resources variability and plan for sustainable resource management, especially in areas where these changes are most significant.”
One example of the human impacts on the water cycle is in North China, which is experiencing an ongoing drought. But vegetation in many areas continues to thrive, partially because producers continue to irrigate their land by pumping more water from groundwater storage, Kumar said. Such interrelated human interventions often lead to complex effects on other water cycle variables, such as evapotranspiration and runoff.
Nie and her colleagues focused on three different kinds of shifts or changes in the cycle: first, a trend, such as a decrease in water in a groundwater reservoir; second, a shift in seasonality, like the typical growing season starting earlier in the year, or an earlier snowmelt; and third a change in extreme events, like “100-year floods” happening more frequently.
The scientists gathered remote sensing data from 2003 to 2020 from several different NASA satellite sources: the Global Precipitation Measurement mission satellite for precipitation data, a soil moisture dataset from the European Space Agency’s Climate Change Initiative, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites for terrestrial water storage data. They also used products from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite instrument to provide information on vegetation health.
“This paper combines several years of our team’s effort in developing capabilities on satellite data analysis, allowing us to precisely simulate continental water fluxes and storages across the planet,” said Augusto Getirana, a research scientist at NASA Goddard and a co-author of the paper.
The study results suggest that Earth system models used to simulate the future global water cycle should evolve to integrate the ongoing effects of human activities. With more data and improved models, producers and water resource managers could understand and effectively plan for what the “new normal” of their local water situation looks like, Nie said.
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Article Title
Nonstationarity in the global terrestrial water cycle and its interlinkages in the Anthropocene
Pacific Islander teens assert identity through language
Pacific Islanders at a more diverse school in Utah pronounced vowels subtly differently than students in a predominantly white school, in line with the theory that groups differentiate along ethnic lines where more groups share social space
University of Utah
video:
Audio clips of study participants saying words from the wordlist. The words show the variation you might hear along a continuum from the location of the tongue in the mouth, from the higher vowel (HID) and the middle (HEAD).
The kids and grandkids of immigrants to the United States usually lose the ability to speak their heritage language fluently. Without access to the heritage language, second- and third-generation Americans may use distinct words and pronunciations in the dominant language, English, to assert their ethnic identities and connect to their communities.
Sociolinguists have long viewed these shifts as markers of cultural change. Like differences in food, clothing and religion, differences in language are subtle ways that groups distinguish themselves along ethnic boundaries. Recent work has pivoted from asking what are the differences to why are there differences? How are they using language to carve out identity? What is the local context that influences how people speak?
One theory posits that ethnic markers are prevalent when two or more cultural groups interact. A recent study led by University of Utah and Brigham Young University researchers is the first to directly test it in the real world. The linguists compared how white and Pacific Islander teens pronounced a series of English words in two Utah high schools with different ethnic makeups: One with a predominately white student body and the other with a lack of an ethnic majority. They found greater phonetic markers among students at the school with more diversity, indicating that the ethnic boundaries are more prominent in that setting.
“Part of identity comes from not just who you’re like, but who you’re different from,” said lead author Lisa Johnson. Now an assistant professor of linguistics at Brigham Young University (BYU), she collected the data as an anthropology doctoral student at the U. “Adolescence is a time when youth gain the cognitive ability and social desire to separate themselves from their parents and find their place in the wider world. In that way, adolescent social structures are like a microcosm of the larger society.”
The paper published in Human Nature on Oct. 21, 2024.
Language shifts as subtle signals
Establishing identity is a deeply human experience. Scholars attribute our success as a species to the ability to form coalitions and cooperate. Over time, we’ve developed conscious and unconscious signals to organize ourselves into groups. These signals include subtle differences in pronunciation, which we may not be conscious of.
Sociolinguistic research in the U.S. has generally ignored Pacific Islanders, a group with deep roots in the west, especially Utah. Pacific Islanders first came to Utah in the late 1800s when Native Hawaiians migrated to the state after contact by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints missionaries. In the 60s, a new wave of people from the Samoa and the Kingdom of Tonga settled in the Wasatch Front, followed by more recent migrations of Fijian, Marshallese, Micronesian and other groups from around the Pacific Rim. Despite different origins, customs and languages, Pacific Islanders have a strong desire to court common values such as religion and a strong sense of responsibility to your family and surrounding community, said Adrian Bell, anthropologist at the U and co-author of the study.
“This study highlights the processes that influence language shifts and what helps preserve the culture. The older generations of Pacific Islanders really care that their grandchildren will reflect some of what they grew up with in their heritage country,” said Bell, whose mother was among the early Tongan immigrants who arrived in the 1970s. “The PI group isn’t necessarily large, but it’s very visible. Part of it is how we see ourselves, and another part is how others see us.”
Speaking with tongues
One way of marking identity is with subtle variations in vowel pronunciation. Vowels are all about the tongue’s location in the mouth; when speaking a vowel, the tongue can be positioned on a scale from high to low and front to back. For example, say the words bit, bet and bat—notice how your tongue moves lower and farther back?
“By varying tongue positions, speakers in every variety of English are engaged in systematic changes in the pronunciation of vowels, called ‘vowel shifts,’ that serve to differentiate one dialect from another,” explained Marianna Di Paolo, sociolinguist at the U and co-author of the paper, who served as Johnson’s U’s faculty advisor.
This study focused on a series of recent vowel changes called the “California Shift,” a phenomenon mocked in the Saturday Night Live skit, “The Californias”—think “trahp” instead of “trap.” Try it—your tongue gets lower and moves farther back in the mouth.
The researchers chose 130 words with different vowels in a variety of word contexts. Participants spoke each word as they flashed across a computer screen in random order, displaying each word twice. Using audio software, the authors analyzed the resonant frequencies of speakers’ vowels to identify the subtle differences pronunciation.
They found strong evidence of ethnic markers at the diverse school. For example, there was a big difference in how students said words like “bit” or “kit.” The Pacific Islanders said this vowel using the more traditional pronunciation with the tongue in a high, front position. In contrast, the white students were much more likely to use the California Shift pronunciation, lowering and shifting the tongue backwards so that “bit” sounded more like “bet.” Surprisingly, this difference was not observed at the predominately white school. In other words, there was a stronger tendency for groups to differentiate where more groups shared the same social space.
“In my mind, that's an indication of a growing awareness of diversity as the demographics of the state are changing,” Johnson said. “This is happening in Utah right now. It’s interesting to see how we’re grappling with those changes, not just in how we mark different groups, but also in how we relate to each other.”
The study serves as a snapshot at two different points of progress—people in the suburbs have more diversity than before, but not as much diversity as the more urban school. The authors hope other researchers can apply this new framework to show how a person’s cultural identity is influenced by the context in which they grow up.
“The bigger picture around ethnic marker theory is to understand what drives cultural change and what helps preserve aspects of culture itself,” Bell said. “Right now, we’re seeing some Pacific Islanders form a kind of Polynesian pan-ethnic identity, probably also happening among our Micronesian and Melanesian relatives, using shared words to build a larger community around shared values.”
The paper, “Evidence for greater marking along ethnic boundaries,” published Oct. 21, 2024, in the journal Human Nature. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation under grant # 1749582.
People who speak with accents perceived as ‘working-class’ including those from Liverpool, Newcastle, Bradford and London risk being stereotyped as more likely to have committed a crime, and becoming victims of injustice, a new study suggests.
Received pronunciation (RP) accent perceived as highest status and less likely to commit crimes with the exception of a sexual offence.
Liverpool’s accent most closely associated with criminal behaviour in general.
Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish accents perceived more positively than regional English accents overall.
Research led by the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with Nottingham Trent University, raises serious concerns about bias in the UK criminal justice system due to negative stereotyping of accents.
These stereotypes, the researchers argue, can affect all parts of the system from arrest to sentencing, and undermine not only suspects and defendants, but also the testimony of witnesses. The study is particularly concerned about accented speakers being incorrectly selected from voice identification parades.
The findings, published today in Frontiers in Communication, suggest that despite progress in equality and diversity in some parts of British life, including ‘working-class’ and regional accents becoming more prominent on television and radio, harmful stereotypes remain.
“Our findings bring into sharp focus the disadvantage that speakers of some accents may still face in the criminal justice system,” said lead author, Alice Paver, from the University of Cambridge’s Phonetics Laboratory and Jesus College, Cambridge.
“Voices play a powerful role in the criminal justice system and police officers, lawyers and juries are all susceptible to judging voices based on stereotypes, whether they're aware of it or not. As things stand, listeners think some accents sound guiltier than others and we should all be concerned about that.”
The test
The researchers, from Cambridge and Nottingham Trent University, asked 180 participants (~50:50 gender split) from across the UK to listen to recordings of ten regionally-accented male voices: Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, London, Newcastle and Standard Southern British English (SSBE), also referred to as RP.
Participants were then asked to rate the voices on 10 social traits – ‘Educated’, ‘Intelligent’, ‘Rich’, ‘Working class’, ‘Friendly’, ‘Honest’, ‘Kind’, ‘Trustworthy’, ‘Aggressive’ and ‘Confident’; as well as on 10 morally ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘ambiguous behaviours’, which included a range of crime types.
These behaviours included: ‘Return a lost wallet to its owner’, ‘Stand up for someone who is being harassed’, ‘Cheat on a romantic partner’, ‘Report a relative to the police for a minor offence’, ‘Drive dangerously’, ‘Physically assault someone’, ‘Shoplift’, ‘Touch someone sexually without consent’, ‘Vandalize a shop front.’
The study used a wider range of recorded accents, behaviours and criminal offences than previous research which has tended to focus on criminal behaviour in general or the binary of white versus blue-collar crime. This study included crimes which are not class stratified, such as a driving offence and a sexual offence, and is the first to identify links between listener perceptions of morality, criminality, and social traits.
To ensure their results would be valid in a criminal justice context, the researchers created voice samples in a similar way to how they are constructed for voice ID parades. The aim was to mimic, as closely as possible, how a juror or earwitness would experience them.
Findings: Status, class and regions
The results show that people with non-standard accents are more likely to be associated with criminal behaviour but that there is significant variation in perceptions between accents.
The RP-like accent was perceived as the least likely to behave in criminal ways, while the Liverpool and Bradford accents were the most likely.
Alice Paver said: “The strongest connection we found was between people's perceptions of class or status, negative traits such as aggression, and how they think someone is going to behave, particularly when it comes to crime. This is the first time that a concrete link between traits and behaviours has been made in the context of accent judgements.”
Unlike previous findings, the researchers did not observe a relationship between ‘solidarity traits’ (such as kindness and trustworthiness) and any behaviours. Status proved a much more important predictor of behaviours, re-enforcing the link between social class and expectations of behaviour in the UK.
However, non-English accents, in particular Belfast’s and Glasgow’s, were rated significantly less likely to behave in criminal ways than almost all other accents. They were also thought most likely to ‘stand up for someone being harassed’ (‘honourable behaviour’) and least likely to exhibit ‘morally bad’ behaviours.
Alice Paver said: “Our findings show that perceptions of speakers of regional accents and how status, social attractiveness and morality interact are much more complex than previously assumed. We need a much more nuanced understanding of how accents are evaluated when it comes to different crime types.”
Findings: Sexual offences
The London and Liverpool accents were rated most likely to touch someone sexually without consent, but they were very closely followed by the RP accent. Participants thought the RP accent was more likely to commit a sexual assault than any of the other offences tested.
“This finding simultaneously undermines certain traditional stereotypes about both higher status and working-class men,” Alice Paver said. “This may indicate shifting perceptions of the ‘type’ of man who can and does commit sexual offences.”
The Glasgow and Belfast speakers were thought the least likely to commit this sexual offence.
The study found that participants perceived this sexual offence as distinct from other criminal behaviours. Poor ratings for it clustered with those for non-criminal ‘morally bad’ behaviours, namely ‘being unfaithful to a romantic partner’ and ‘lying on a CV’.
Findings: Newcastle and Birmingham
Previous studies have found that the Newcastle accent rates highly for traits such as friendliness, but this study recorded less positive ratings for kindness, honesty, friendliness and trustworthiness.
By contrast, the Birmingham accent, which has rated poorly in previous research across these measures, performed better than Bradford, Bristol, Liverpool, London and Newcastle in this study.
“Although relatively stable over time, language attitudes can change,” Alice Paver said. “This might be the case for the Birmingham and Newcastle accents. But previous studies have often asked people what they think of an accent label whereas we played them an actual voice. That’s a very different stimulus so we’re not surprised people reacted differently.”
Bringing about change
The study contributes to the Improving Voice Identification Procedures project. Its team of researchers is currently drafting revised guidelines for voice identification parades aimed at police officers and legal professionals.
They support the use of pre-tests to screen for bias against foil or suspect voices to make sure that they don't stand out as sounding unduly guilty or untrustworthy.
“Jurors are not currently made aware of or warned against letting voice- or accent-based prejudice sway their decisions,” Paver said. “If we're asked to judge whether someone is guilty or not, and they've got a particular accent, we need to be sure we're not making that judgment because we think they sound like a bad guy.”
The researchers hope that future studies will examine even more offence types; further explore the relationships between perceptions of criminality and other, non-criminal, behaviours; and make use of a broader range of voices for each accent to tease apart the effect of individual voices and the strength of regional accents.
Funding
This research was supported by the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council as part of the project Improving Voice Identification Procedures (IVIP), reference ES/S015965/1. Additional funding was provided by the Isaac Newton Trust.
Reference
A. Paver, D. Wright, N. Braber and N. Pautz, ‘Stereotyped accent judgements in forensic contexts: listener perceptions of social traits and types of behaviour’, Frontiers in Communication (2025). DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2024.1462013
Stereotyped accent judgements in forensic contexts: listener perceptions of social traits and types of behaviour
Article Publication Date
17-Jan-2025
What do you think ‘guilty’ sounds like? Scientists find accent stereotypes influence beliefs about who commits crimes
Scientists studying the impact of accents on prejudices find that people associate accents they consider more working-class with more criminal behavior
The way you talk says a lot about you — but what people think it says may not be true. While no accent is better than any other, people use accents as markers for identifying and stereotyping social groups. In the justice system, these accent stereotypes could influence perceptions of guilt, leading to discrimination. Scientists collaborating on the Improving Voice Identification Procedures project explored this by testing participants’ perceptions of ten different accents heard around the UK. They found that speakers with accents considered lower-status were considered more likely to have committed crimes.
“We found a strong link between perceived social status and the perceived likelihood of committing crimes,” said Alice Paver of the University of Cambridge, lead author of the study in Frontiers in Communication. “This link was more important than how trustworthy, kind or honest someone was perceived to be. This shows that perceived social class, as judged from a speaker’s accent, is an important predictor of UK listeners’ expectations about behavior, and this might have serious implications in the criminal justice system.”
Anti-social accents?
Paver and her colleagues — Dr David Wright, Professor Natalie Braber, and Dr Nikolas Pautz of Nottingham Trent University — recruited 180 participants from all over the UK and assigned them to one of two surveys. The first asked participants to rate voices according to 10 social traits, while the second asked participants to rate how likely the voices were to have performed 10 behaviors — five different crimes and five moral behaviors, like defending a victim of harassment or cheating on your partner.
The scientists created 30-second collages from recordings of men speaking English in 10 accents: Belfast, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, London, Newcastle, and Standard Southern British English (SSBE). To minimize outside influences, the scientists removed names and standardized the collages for speed, pitch, and intensity of speech. The samples were also reviewed by phoneticians to ensure they accurately reflected how most people with these accents speak.
The scientists then analyzed the participants’ responses to look for patterns. They found two major clusters of traits, which they named ‘solidarity’ — traits like kindness — versus ‘status’ — traits like wealth — as well as two minor clusters, labelled ‘confident’ and ‘working class’. The last cluster was the exact opposite of the ‘status’ cluster. SSBE was most highly rated on ‘status’ traits, as well as the ‘confident’ cluster, and the lowest rated in the ‘working class’ cluster.
All the crimes, except for sexual assault, clustered together. The higher an accent was rated for status, the lower it was rated for criminal acts. Sexual assault clustered with negative behaviors which weren’t necessarily illegal, so the authors labelled this cluster of behaviors as ‘morally bad’. The London and Liverpool speakers rated as likely, and the Glasgow and Belfast speakers as unlikely, to display morally bad behaviors.
However, while participants might assume someone is unlikely to commit a crime based on their accent, that assumption may not imply positive, prosocial behavior. For instance, the SSBE speaker, unlike the Liverpool speaker, was considered less likely to defend a victim of harassment.
“We didn’t see a strong link between how criminal someone’s voice sounded, and how kind or trustworthy they sounded,” said Paver. “Instead, there was a much more important link between how criminal a voice sounds and how working-class a voice sounds.”
Additionally, although the SSBE accent was rated less likely to have committed most crimes, that didn’t apply to the sexual assault. This could indicate that the image of people who commit sexual assault has moved away from historical assumptions implicating working-class men, unlike other types of crime.
Talking sense
The authors emphasized that more research, including more voices — particularly women’s voices — and investigating how accent strength affects assumptions, is needed to capture a fuller picture of accent biases. Additionally, they couldn’t rule out that vocal characteristics they couldn’t control for might have influenced their participants’ judgements.
“The team are currently drafting new guidelines for the implementation of voice line-ups,” said Paver. “We support the use of pre-testing to screen for voice bias. We also hope that anyone encountering voice evidence in the criminal justice system is warned against letting voice- or accent-based prejudice influence their decisions. These stereotypes could have real-life legal consequences.”
