A low voice increases standing among strangers, cross-cultural study finds

If you’re looking for a long-term relationship or to improve your social status, lower your voice, according to researchers studying the effects of tone of voice on social perceptions. They found that a lower voice makes both women and men more attractive to potential long-term partners, and that a lower voice in men makes the individual more formidable and prestigious among other men.

The results of the cross-cultural study, published in the journal Psychological scienceshave implications for understanding human evolution and how people today confer and evaluate social status.

“Vocal communication is one of the most important human characteristics, and tone is the most perceptible aspect of voice,” said David Puts, study co-author and professor of anthropology at Penn State. . “Understanding how tone of voice influences social perceptions can help us understand social relationships more broadly, how we achieve social status, how we evaluate others in terms of social status, and how we choose our partners.”

To study how voice pitch influences social perceptions, researchers selected two male and female voice recordings all repeating the same phrase. They edited the clips to produce the average pitch of the speaker’s gender as well as a higher and lower pitched version of each voice, for a total of 12 clips, and divided the clips into male-male and female-pairs. female.

The researchers then asked more than 3,100 participants across 22 countries, representing five continents and New Zealand, to listen to the paired recordings and answer questions about whose voice sounded more attractive, flirtatious, the most formidable and the most prestigious.

Researchers found that both women and men preferred deeper voices when asked which voice they would prefer for a long-term relationship such as marriage. They also found that a lower male voice made the individual more formidable, particularly in younger men, and more prestigious, particularly in older men. Perceptions of awesomeness and prestige had a greater impact in societies characterized by greater relational mobility – where group members interact more often with strangers – and more violence.

“We looked at the homicide rate as a way to quantify the degree of physical violence in a society, which was likely an important factor in the reproductive success of our male ancestors,” Puts said, explaining that human men have often faced threats of violence while competing for prizes. friends and those who were taller – or appeared taller – tended to be more successful.

“Human males have sexual traits, such as upper body muscle mass, that appear to have been shaped by male use of force or the threat of force to win mating opportunities. Low voice exaggerates size. It makes an organism, whether a person or non-human primate, appear large and intimidating.

The fact that study participants across cultures perceived a lower male voice as conferring tremendous strength and high social status suggests that these characteristics were likely also conferred on our ancestors, Puts said. He compared the effect to that of Darth Vader’s voice in the Star Wars franchise: no matter where the character goes in the galaxy, his deep tone is perceived as fearsome because larger beings tend to produce lower frequencies .

“The results suggest that deep voices evolved in men because our male ancestors frequently interacted with foreign competitors, and they show how we can use evolutionary thinking and research on non-human animals to predict and understand how our psychology and our behaviors vary across social contexts, including cross-culturally,” Puts said.

“Male traits such as deep voices and beards are very socially important, but this new research shows that the importance of at least one of these traits varies predictably across societies, and suggests that others, like the beard, also vary.”

Additionally, researchers found that men perceived women with higher-pitched voices as more attractive for short-term relationships, and women perceived higher-pitched voices as flirtatious and more attractive to men. In societies with low relational mobility, where group members are more likely to know each other, women may perceive these flirtatious voices as a threat to existing social networks, researchers say.

“Female secondary sexual traits, like voice, appear to be much better designed to attract a mate rather than to physically threaten oneself,” Puts said. “We found that we could use relational mobility to predict women’s sensitivity to high tone of voice among competitors. Sensitivity might have been higher in societies with low relational mobility, because flirtatious behavior is not only a threat to your romantic relationship, but also to your friendships.”

A common misconception is that early humans lived only in small-scale societies where everyone knew each other, Puts said. This was sometimes true, but ethnographic and archaeological records show that group sizes were often large.

And although many people lived in small societies, he added, growing evidence suggests that they periodically joined other groups to form large-scale societies numbering in the hundreds or thousands. They sometimes lived in these large groups for months and maintained these social networks even when they returned to live in smaller communities.

“This study suggests that tone of voice is relevant to social perceptions across societies,” Puts said. “But it also shows that the extent of our attention to discourse when assigning social attributions is variable across societies and sensitive to relevant sociocultural variables. In a society where relational mobility is higher and you have With less direct information about your competitors, people seem to pay more attention to an easily identifiable and recognizable signal like tone of voice.