According to a recent study, Voice Pitch plays a pivotal role in shaping social perceptions across different cultures. The study, which included more than 3,100 participants from 22 countries, focused on evaluating voice recordings for attractiveness, formidability, and prestige. The findings suggest that a lower voice pitch is preferred universally for long-term relationships and is associated with increased formidability and prestige in males. This cross-cultural research highlights the evolutionary roots of how voice pitch affects social status and mate choice, accentuating its importance in human interaction and social mobility.
Key Facts
Lower voice pitch is globally preferred for long-term relationships and signals higher social status and formidability in males.
The study’s findings are consistent across 22 countries, suggesting a universal aspect of human psychology related to voice pitch perceptions.
Voice pitch’s impact on social evaluations is influenced by societal factors such as relational mobility and violence rates, indicating its adaptability to social environments.
Source: Penn State
If you’re interested in a long-term relationship or want to enhance your social status, the study found that having a lower voice pitch can be beneficial. Lower voice pitch is found to make both women and men sound more attractive to potential long-term partners, and in males, a lower voice pitch makes them sound more formidable and prestigious among other men.
The results of the cross-cultural study, published in the journal Psychological Science, have implications for understanding human evolution and how people today confer and evaluate social status.
To study how voice pitch influences social perceptions, the researchers selected two male and two female voice recordings, all repeating the same sentence.
“Vocal communication is one of the most important human characteristics, and pitch is the most perceptually noticeable aspect of voice,” said David Puts, study co-author and professor of anthropology at Penn State.
They edited the clips to produce the average pitch for the speaker’s sex plus a higher-pitched and lower-pitched version of each voice, for a total of 12 clips, and divided the clips into male-male and female-female pairings.
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 which voice sounded more attractive, flirtatious, formidable and prestigious.
The researchers found that women and men preferred lower-pitched voices when asked which voice they would prefer for a long-term relationship such as marriage. They also found that a lower male voice pitch made the individual sound more formidable, especially among younger men, and more prestigious, particularly among older men.
Perceptions of formidability and prestige had a larger impact in societies with more relational mobility — where group members interact more often with strangers — and more violence.
“We looked at homicide rate as a way of quantifying the degree of physical violence in a society, which was probably an important factor for our male ancestors’ reproductive success,” Puts said, explaining that human males often experienced threats of violence in competition over mates and those who were bigger — or seemed bigger — tended to have more success.
“The study suggests that voice pitch is relevant to social perceptions across societies,” Puts said.“But it also shows that the extent of our attention to voice pitch when making social attributions is variable across societies and responsive to relevant sociocultural variables.
In addition, the researchers found that men perceived females with higher-pitched voices as more attractive for short-term relationships, and women perceived higher pitches as sounding more flirtatious and being more attractive to men. In societies with lower relational mobility, where group members are more likely to know one another, women may perceive these flirtatious voices as a threat to existing social networks, according to the researchers.
“Female secondary sex traits, like voice, look like they’re much better designed for mate attraction rather than threatening each other physically,” Puts said.
The image is credited to Neuroscience NewsOriginal Research: Open access.
“Effects of Voice Pitch on Social Perceptions Vary With Relational Mobility and Homicide Rate” by David Puts et al. Psychological ScienceAbstractEffects of Voice Pitch on Social Perceptions Vary With Relational Mobility and Homicide RateFundamental frequency ( fo) is the most perceptually salient vocal acoustic parameter, yet little is known about how its perceptual influence varies across societies.We examined how fo affects key social perceptions and how socioecological variables modulate these effects in 2,647 adult listeners sampled from 44 locations across 22 nations. Low male fo increased men’s perceptions of formidability and prestige, especially in societies with higher homicide rates and greater relational mobility in which male intrasexual competition may be more intense and rapid identification of high-status competitors may be exigent.
High female fo increased women’s perceptions of flirtatiousness where relational mobility was lower and threats to mating relationships may be greater. These results indicate that the influence of fo on social perceptions depends on socioecological variables, including those related to competition for status and mates.
