Artificial intelligence voice gender, gender role congruity, and trust in automated vehicles

Zhang, Qiaoning · 2025 · Scientific Reports

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-00884-9

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Summary

This study investigates how the gender of an automated vehicle’s (AV) voice and the alignment of that voice with societal gender stereotypes influence user trust. While prior research has focused on the content of auditory explanations, this paper addresses a gap in understanding how voice characteristics, specifically gender similarity between the user and the AV, shape cognitive and affective trust. The research is motivated by the tension between similarity-attraction theory, which suggests users trust entities resembling themselves, and the widespread default use of female voices in AI assistants, which may reflect gender-role congruity rather than user preference. The authors conducted a randomized between-subjects experimental study using an online survey with 326 U.S. drivers. The design manipulated two independent variables: gender similarity (whether the AV voice matched the participant’s gender) and gender-role congruity (whether the voice gender aligned with the perceived role of the AV, categorized as either a “driving assistant” or “driving supervisor”). Participants viewed six video scenarios of AV driving behaviors accompanied by voice explanations generated by text-to-speech platforms. Trust was measured using validated scales for cognitive trust (based on rational assessment of reliability) and affective trust (based on emotional connection). Control variables included age, gender, AV familiarity, and voice agent experience. The results revealed that gender similarity alone did not significantly impact cognitive trust, contradicting the initial hypothesis. However, gender similarity significantly increased affective trust, with participants reporting higher emotional connection when the AV voice matched their gender. Crucially, gender-role congruity moderated these relationships. When the AV’s voice gender aligned with its perceived role (e.g., female voice for an assistant role, male for a supervisor role), gender similarity enhanced both cognitive and affective trust. Conversely, when the voice gender was incongruent with the AV’s role, the trust-enhancing effect of gender similarity disappeared. The effect of congruity was more pronounced for affective trust than for cognitive trust. These findings suggest that societal stereotypes regarding gender roles significantly shape user trust in AVs. The study concludes that AV voice design should consider not only user similarity but also the functional role of the vehicle to optimize trust. Aligning voice gender with expected roles can leverage gender-role congruity to enhance user acceptance, while mismatches may undermine the benefits of gender similarity. This highlights the need for AV designers to avoid reinforcing social biases and to strategically select voice characteristics that align with the vehicle’s operational context to foster both rational and emotional trust.

Key finding

Voice gender similarity enhances affective trust in automated vehicles, but this effect is moderated by gender-role congruity, diminishing when the voice gender conflicts with the vehicle's perceived role.

Methodology

lab_experiment

Sample size: 326

Provenance

The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via unpaywall on 2026-05-07 (12 acquisition events logged).

Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

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• trust in automation foundations