In the laboratory, men and women are more likely to vote for political candidates with deeper voices, according to a new US study where two biologists teamed up with a political scientist to examine the effect of voice pitch on voters’ preferences. Their findings are published in the 14 March online issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The researchers now plan to test their findings in the presidential elections in November.
Co-author Rindy Anderson, a biologist at Duke University, Durham, in North Carolina, told the press their study shows our voices carry more information than the words we utter:
“We often make snap judgments about candidates without full knowledge of their policies or positions. These findings might help explain why.”
She said they may also explain why fewer women are elected to high office in politics.
We already know that non-human animals respond to information encoded in vocal signals, and that humans respond to this too, write the authors. Research shows that the pitch of a human voice affects the way speakers are perceived, but there is little information on how this affect voters’ selection of leaders.
So Anderson and colleagues Casey A. Klofstad, a political scientist at the University of Miami in Florida, and Susan Peters, another biologist at Duke University, set out to investigate this question.
First they recorded men and women saying the words:
“I urge you to vote for me this November.”
Then they digitally manipulated the recordings to create higher and lower pitched versions of the originals, and invited volunteers to listen to them and place a vote for either the higher or the lower pitched speaker.
At the University of Miami, 37 men and 46 women listened to the female voices, while at Duke, 49 men and 40 women listened to the male voices.
The results showed that both men and women tend to select male and female leaders with lower pitched voices.
“These findings suggest that men and women with lower-pitched voices may be more successful in obtaining positions of leadership. This might also suggest that because women, on average, have higher-pitched voices than men, voice pitch could be a factor that contributes to fewer women holding leadership roles than men,” conclude the authors.
“… these results clearly demonstrate that these choices cannot be understood in isolation from biological influences,” they add.
Brad Verhulst is a researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He was not involved in the study but said it was an exciting application of some previous research that studied how visual cues influence people’s perceptions of candidates and their competence.
He told the media the findings are an “interesting first step toward understanding the psychological mechanisms that affect voters’ choices”.
In a separate experiment, Anderson and colleagues invited three further groups of 35 men and 35 women to listen to the same recordings. They asked them to choose which candidate seemed stronger, more trustworthy and competent.
In the case of the female voices, both male and female listeners tended to perceive the ones with lower pitch as having all three character traits.
But in the case of the male voices, only the men perceived the candidates with lower pitch as being stronger and more competent.
Speculating on these findings, Anderson suggests that perhaps men tune into other men’s voices to gauge competitiveness and social aggression, whereas women do not tune into male voices to gauge these traits: they use other cues.
Anderson said we should be careful about interpreting these results in a real world context: so far these experiments have only taken place in the lab, where many other potential influencers can be controlled.
Verhulst agrees. Although this was a carefully controlled study, “until the idea is more thoroughly fleshed out, the broader application to real-world politics is still a conjecture”, he cautioned.
So, the next thing Anderson and colleagues plan to do, is test these findings in the 2012 US elections this November.
Written by Catharine Paddock PhD