Original Article
Voice pitch influences voting behavior

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2011.09.004Get rights and content

Abstract

It may be adaptive for voters to recognize good leadership qualities among politicians. Men with lower-pitched voices are found to be more dominant and attractive than are men with higher-pitched voices. Candidate attractiveness and vocal quality relate to voting behavior, but no study has tested the influence of voice pitch on voting-related perceptions. We tested whether voice pitch influenced perceptions of politicians and how these perceptions related to voting behavior. In Study 1, we manipulated voice pitch of recordings of US presidents and asked participants to attribute personality traits to the voices and to choose the voice they preferred to vote for. We found that lower-pitched voices were associated with favorable personality traits more often than were higher-pitched voices and that people preferred to vote for politicians with lower-pitched rather than higher-pitched voices. Furthermore, lower voice pitch was more strongly associated with physical prowess than with integrity in a wartime voting scenario. Thus, sensitivity to vocal cues to dominance was heightened during wartime. In Study 2, we found that participants preferred to vote for the candidate with the lower-pitched voice when given the choice between two unfamiliar men's voices speaking a neutral sentence. Taken together, our results suggest that candidates' voice pitch has an important influence on voting behavior and that men with lower-pitched voices may have an advantage in political elections.

Introduction

Natural selection may have favored the ability to detect qualities of effective leadership because the choice of a leader affects an individual's ability to survive and reproduce within a social group (Darwin, 1871, Trivers, 1971). Today, group leaders are often chosen in national elections. Government officials directly affect social policies that contribute to reproductive success via allocation of vital resources. Therefore, choosing good leadership qualities in political candidates may be adaptive.

Despite the ubiquity of visual media technology, the sound of politicians' voices alone may influence voters' perceptions of candidates. Indeed, it has been shown that politicians with more attractive voices are perceived more positively than politicians with less attractive voices (Surawski & Ossoff, 2006). Furthermore, Gregory and Gallagher (2002) analyzed audio tapes from 19 US presidential debates between 1960 and 2000 and found that those candidates who had more acoustic energy concentrated at lower vocal frequencies won the popular vote of all eight elections they analyzed.

Studies of men's vocal attractiveness have identified voice pitch as a strong acoustic correlate of male vocal attractiveness (Collins, 2000). Subsequent studies have demonstrated that both men and women find men with lower-pitched voices to be more attractive (Feinberg et al., 2008, Feinberg et al., 2005, Jones et al., 2010) and dominant (Jones et al., 2010, Puts et al., 2006, Puts et al., 2007) than those with higher-pitched voices. Jones et al. (2010) demonstrated that both men and women are equally sensitive to the relationship between voice pitch and male dominance.

Low voice pitch may have in part evolved as a dominance cue among men (Puts, 2010 for review). Subordinate men change their vocal pitch and speech patterns to match those of dominant men (Gregory & Webster, 1996), and men who think they are relatively more dominant lower their voice pitch in response to mate competition, whereas men who think they are relatively less dominant raise the pitch of their voices in response to mate competition (Puts et al., 2006).

Although voting decisions result from a complex interaction of factors, mate-choice relevant factors can influence voting behavior. Recently, Navarrete, McDonald, Mott, Cesario, and Sapolsky (2010) showed that women's conception risk positively predicted their intention to vote for Barack Obama in the 2008 US presidential election and that this effect was strongest among women who perceived him as more white than black. Little, Burriss, Jones, and Roberts (2007) demonstrated that voters preferred to vote for candidates with relatively more masculine and dominant faces, but not relatively more attractive faces. Furthermore, a candidate's facial appearance can influence voters' perceptions in a very short period of time. Todorov, Mandisodza, Goren, and Hall (2005) showed that inferences of competence from a 1-s exposure to candidates' faces accurately predicted the outcomes of US congressional elections from 2000 to 2004. Little et al. (2007) also showed that voters preferred masculine and dominant faces in wartime but preferred attractive faces in peacetime.

When at war, it may be particularly important to choose an effective group leader. There is recent evidence that people can accurately assess upper body strength from men's voices and that these vocal cues can be used to assess men's fighting ability (Sell et al., 2010). Unlike strength, perceptions of body size based on voice pitch are often wrong and exhibit a consistent misattribution bias (Rendall, Vokey, & Nemeth, 2007). Vocal cues to physical strength may be more important in a leader during wartime than in peacetime because stronger men are more likely to favor the use of military force than are weaker men (Sell, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2009).

While facial appearance alters voting behavior (Little et al., 2007, Todorov et al., 2005) and voice qualities are related to election outcomes and voting behavior (Gregory and Gallagher, 2002, Surawski and Ossoff, 2006), no study has investigated the role of voice pitch in voting-related perceptions. In Study 1, we addressed this gap in the literature using voice recordings of past US presidents. We manipulated the voice pitch of each recording and asked participants to attribute personality traits and to choose the version of the voice they preferred to vote for. We hypothesized that voice pitch would be negatively related to voting choices. We also hypothesized that the relationship between voice pitch and dominance would more strongly influence voting behavior in the wartime scenario than in the general national election scenario.

In Study 2, we tested whether the effects we observed in Study 1 could be replicated using unfamiliar male voices speaking a neutral sentence. We manipulated the pitch of each voice and asked participants to choose the voice they preferred to vote for between a high-pitch version of one person's voice and the low-pitch version of a different person's voice. Again, we hypothesized that voice pitch would be negatively related to voting choices.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants (N=125) included 61 females (mean age=19.61±2.23 years) and 64 males (mean age=21.59±4.23 years) who received course credit or payment in exchange for participation.

Stimuli

We obtained voice recordings of nine United States presidents from the online archive of the Vincent Voice Library of Michigan State University (http://vvl.lib.msu.edu; available in the online Appendix at www.ehbonline.org). We created a lower-pitched and higher-pitched version of each president's voice using the

Study 2

The aim of Study 2 was to test if the influence of voice pitch on voting preferences we observed in Study 1 could be replicated using voices of nonpoliticians speaking nonpolitical content in a situation where participants chose between the voices of two different people rather than two versions of the same person's voice.

Discussion

In Study 1, we found that lower-pitched voices were associated with favorable personality traits more often than were higher-pitched voices (Table 1). This finding is consistent with previous work demonstrating that lower-pitched men's voices sound more dominant and attractive than do higher-pitched men's voices (see Feinberg, 2008 for review; Jones et al., 2010, Puts et al., 2006, Puts et al., 2007). Our research suggests that the relationship between voice pitch and dominance is relevant for

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    David R. Feinberg is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Ministry of Research and Innovation.

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