News
The Truth In Your Voice
Irrespective of the content, a person's voice can communicate a lot of information about them, to the point of giving away secrets. "Voices relay important information pertaining to mating success and sexual behavior," a new study says.
According to the recent study published in Evolutionary Psychology - "Your Cheatin' Voice Will Tell on You: Detection of Past Infidelity From Voice" - undergraduate students could accurately assess whether someone had cheated on their committed romantic partner just by listening to a recording of their voice.
Also a person's sex, race, social status, personality traits - even their height and weight, and whether their body or face is symmetrical - can all be deduced by voice alone.
Knowing how revelatory voices can be, Susan M. Hughes, a psychology professor at Albright College in Pennsylvania, delved into a database she had of voices counting from 1 to 10. Hughes and her fellow researcher, Marissa A. Harrison, asked study participants to listen to samples of 10 women's and 10 men's voices.
"Half of the speakers for each sex reported that they had sexual intercourse with a person outside of a previous or current, exclusive and committed relationship at some point in their lives (i.e., were 'cheaters'), and the other half reported never cheating on their partners," the study noted.
To ensure that the voice samples were as similar as possible, all of the voices used were from people who reported being heterosexual, white, unmarried and in a committed romantic relationship.
Participants then rated the voices on a scale of 1 (not at all likely to cheat) to 10 (very likely).
These were voices of strangers the participants didn't know, with no content about their relationships being revealed, just a voice counting from one to 10. And yet those recordings revealed volumes about their personal lives.
"We found that participants indeed rated the voices of those who had a history of cheating as more likely to cheat," the researchers reported. More likely than not, Hughes noted, participants correctly identified the cheaters from the non-cheaters.
According to the recent study published in Evolutionary Psychology - "Your Cheatin' Voice Will Tell on You: Detection of Past Infidelity From Voice" - undergraduate students could accurately assess whether someone had cheated on their committed romantic partner just by listening to a recording of their voice.
Also a person's sex, race, social status, personality traits - even their height and weight, and whether their body or face is symmetrical - can all be deduced by voice alone.
Knowing how revelatory voices can be, Susan M. Hughes, a psychology professor at Albright College in Pennsylvania, delved into a database she had of voices counting from 1 to 10. Hughes and her fellow researcher, Marissa A. Harrison, asked study participants to listen to samples of 10 women's and 10 men's voices.
"Half of the speakers for each sex reported that they had sexual intercourse with a person outside of a previous or current, exclusive and committed relationship at some point in their lives (i.e., were 'cheaters'), and the other half reported never cheating on their partners," the study noted.
To ensure that the voice samples were as similar as possible, all of the voices used were from people who reported being heterosexual, white, unmarried and in a committed romantic relationship.
Participants then rated the voices on a scale of 1 (not at all likely to cheat) to 10 (very likely).
These were voices of strangers the participants didn't know, with no content about their relationships being revealed, just a voice counting from one to 10. And yet those recordings revealed volumes about their personal lives.
"We found that participants indeed rated the voices of those who had a history of cheating as more likely to cheat," the researchers reported. More likely than not, Hughes noted, participants correctly identified the cheaters from the non-cheaters.