Why do many people listen to the voice again after sending it？

　　Have you ever found that many people around you will listen to it again every time they send a WeChat voice message? Even if you are chatting casually with friends, you should click on it and listen again. Why is this happening? Let’s talk from a psychological point of view today.

　　It is a self-verification process to listen to the speech after it is finished.

　　The behavior of "listening again after the speech is finished" does not happen to everyone, but to people with certain characteristics or motives. In fact, some psychological factors are at work behind this.

　　Swan, a social psychologist, put forward a theory of self-verification. He believed that people tend to know their true selves, so people always want to get objective, accurate and diagnostic information to reduce the uncertainty about their own abilities and personality characteristics. In other words, people always want to confirm what kind of person they are through various methods.

　　For example, if someone thinks he is smart, he will actively verify this view, such as engaging in mental activities, selectively seeking, accepting and retaining information that can prove that he is smart, trying to convince others that he is smart, and so on.

　　Psychologist Gonzalez once designed a study that asked volunteers to browse their personal information on social media in their rooms. It was found that after a period of time, the self-esteem level of these volunteers improved significantly, especially when a person edited or selectively presented personal information, the self-evaluation would also change. This shows that the personal information published and transmitted by people on the Internet is also a process of self-verification. In other words, with the increasing popularity of online communication, for some people, the self-image built on the Internet is particularly important.

　　In addition, we are in a society, and it is a very important and common way to verify ourselves by revealing information to others. Listening to voice messages is such a process.

　　Voice contains more personal information than words, including timbre, tone, words and so on. For example, many people on the Internet think that they are "voice-activated", which means that they pay special attention to voice and will like each other because of their voice, which shows that voice is a very important feature of a person.

　　People confirm whether their voice is pleasant, whether their tone and words conform to their personal characteristics and so on by hearing their own voice hard. In this process, self-concept and evaluation will be consolidated, such as more convinced that they are gentle and lovely, or masculine, and so on.

　　Of course, some hard of hearing may be to see if I have said something wrong. From the perspective of self-verification theory, hard of hearing pronunciation for the reason of being careful not to make mistakes is also a way of self-verification. Because it means that we want to prove that we are a reliable and not careless person.

　　Excessive self-verification may make people "opinionated"

　　Some people may think that whether it is listening to voice messages or the so-called self-verification process, it sounds like narcissism, but in fact self-verification is very important.

　　On the one hand, self-verification helps us to form a stable self-concept and enhance our self-confidence, on the other hand, it will drive us to seek corresponding external evaluation, thus strengthening our identity, role and characteristics. Even if the external evaluation is inconsistent with the self-concept, we have the opportunity to adjust it until it is consistent.

　　It is found that if we are always exposed to information inconsistent with our self-cognition, our self-evaluation will decline, and it is also easy to produce psychological problems such as anxiety and depression. For example, I think I am good at math, but if I keep doing some difficult problems, then I will doubt my ability and my self-concept will conflict. In order to protect myself, I may choose negative strategies such as denial and evasion, and maybe I will never like math again.

　　Therefore, we often need to carry out self-verification, establish and consolidate self-concept to maintain a certain level of self-esteem and self-confidence. From this perspective, it is not a bad thing to listen to your own WeChat voice every time.

　　However, self-verification is not a beneficial process, because self-verification is often selectively seeking information consistent with self-cognition, which means that we tend to ignore, deny and escape those inconsistent information, especially when our self-cognition is not accurate. Self-verification may make us fall into the cage of "stubborn opinions".

　　And most of the time, we may not be aware of our own tendencies. This explains that some people only like to hear what they want to hear, but for those who don’t like to hear, they choose to escape, defend and even lose their temper. This is because there is a conflict in self-concept, and then there is discomfort in the heart, and then a negative emotional reaction is made, but I don’t know why I have such a big reaction.

　　Generally speaking, "Every time we send WeChat voice, we always listen to it again" is a process of self-verification, which can help us build a stable self-cognition and evaluation in self-verification again and again. (The article is from WeChat WeChat official account Popular Science China)