Cross-cultural research reveals that having a lower voice pitch increases your status among strangers

If you want a long-term relationship or want to improve your social status, lower your pitch, according to researchers studying the effects of voice pitch on social perception. . Researchers have found that a lower pitch of the voice makes both women and men sound more attractive to potential long-term partners, and that a lower pitch of a man’s voice makes him more attractive to other people. I found it sounded more formidable and honorable among men.

Cross-cultural research results published in journals psychological scienceinfluences our understanding of human evolution and how people confer and value social status today.

“Voice communication is one of the most important human characteristics, and pitch is the most perceptually salient aspect of speech,” said study co-author David Putz, professor of anthropology at Penn State University. “Understanding how the pitch of your voice affects social perception has implications for social relationships, how we gain social status, and how we evaluate others based on their social status. , which can help us understand more broadly, such as how we choose our spouses.”

To study how voice pitch affects social cognition, researchers selected audio recordings of two men and two women repeating the same sentence. They edited the clips to create high- and low-pitched versions of each voice in addition to the average pitch for the speaker’s gender, creating a total of 12 clips, and edited the clips to create male-to-male and female-to-female clips. divided into pairs.

The researchers then asked more than 3,100 participants from 22 countries, representing five continents and New Zealand, to listen to recordings of the pairs and asked which voice was more attractive, flirtatious, authoritative, or authoritative. They answered questions about how it sounds.

Researchers found that when asked which voice they preferred for long-term relationships, such as marriage, both women and men preferred a deeper voice. They also found that a lower pitch in a man’s voice made him sound more fearsome, especially among younger men, and more authoritative, especially among older men. Perceptions of fearfulness and prestige were more influential in societies where relationships were more fluid, group members interacted more frequently with strangers, and there was more violence.

“We looked at homicide rates as a way to quantify the level of physical violence in a society, which was likely an important factor for the reproductive success of our male ancestors,” Putz said. stated that human males often experienced the threat of violence in competition. People who were or appeared to be bigger than their peers and themselves tended to have more success.

“Human males have sexual characteristics, such as upper body muscle mass, that appear to have been shaped by men using force or threatening force to win mating opportunities. .A low pitch of the voice exaggerates the size of an organism, whether it’s a human or a non-human primate that looks large and intimidating. ”

The fact that research participants from different cultures perceived a lower male voice pitch as conferring formidable power and high social status suggests that these characteristics were similarly conferred on our ancestors. Putz said this suggests that there is a high possibility that the He likened the effect to that of Darth Vader’s voice in the Star Wars series. No matter where the character goes in the galaxy, his bass is perceived as formidable. Because larger beings tend to emit lower frequencies.

“The findings suggest that deep voices evolved in men because our male ancestors frequently interacted with unfamiliar competitors, and use evolutionary thinking and research from non-human animals to “This study shows us how to predict and understand how our psychology and behavior change across social contexts, including across cultures,” Putz said.

“Male traits such as deep voices and facial hair are highly socially salient, but this new study shows that the salience of at least one of these traits varies in predictable ways across societies. Other features, such as whiskers, suggest the same.”

Additionally, researchers found that men perceive women with high-pitched voices to be more attractive for short-term relationships, and women perceive high-pitched voices to sound more flirty and more attractive to men. I discovered that. Researchers say that in societies where group members are more likely to know each other and relationships are less fluid, women may perceive these flirtatious voices as a threat to their existing social networks. .

“Female secondary sex characteristics, like voice, seem to be much better designed to attract mates than to physically threaten each other,” Putz says. “We found that relational fluidity could be used to predict women’s sensitivity to the loudness of competitors’ voices. It is possible that sensitivity was higher in societies with lower relational fluidity. Because flirtatious behavior is a threat not only to romantic relationships but also to friendships.”

A common misconception is that early humans lived only in small societies where everyone knew each other, Putz said. Although this was sometimes true, the ethnographic and archaeological record shows that group sizes were often large.

And although many people lived in small societies, there is evidence to suggest that they regularly joined other groups to form larger societies of hundreds or thousands of people. He added that it is increasing. They lived in these large groups, sometimes for months at a time, and maintained these social networks even after returning to life in smaller communities.

“This study suggests that voice pitch is related to social perception in society as a whole,” Putz said. “However, this also shows that the degree of attention we pay to the pitch of our voices when forming social affiliations varies across societies and varies depending on relevant sociocultural variables. In a society with high mobility and less direct information about competitors, people seem to be thinking: pay more attention to easily identifiable and recognizable signals, such as voice pitch. Please pay.”