Deep voiced leaders

When it comes to election time you carefully assess the arguments put forward by the candidates and exercise your franchise with due diligence and care, right? Well, maybe you do but could it be that rather than their policies a candidate’s tone of voice might convince you to vote for them? According to a new study that might well be the case.

The new study involved an initial experiment in which subjects were given information about the age and sex of two candidates and asked which candidate they would vote for. The candidates ranged in age from their 30s to 70s but it emerged that those in their 40s and 50s were far more likely to be chosen. The researchers thought this was because at these ages you are not so young as to be inexperienced but not so old that health may affect the way you do your job.

In a second study more than 800 subjects (equally women and men) were asked to listen to two voices saying “I urge you to vote for me” and indicate which they would be more likely to vote for. Each paired recording was actually one voice that had been altered with computer software to either deepen or lighten the pitch. The deeper voiced candidates won 76 per cent of the votes and this held true for women candidates as well.

The researchers thought this might be because voices are at their deepest pitch in our middle years. However, when the subjects were interviewed they did not indicate they thought they were voting for the older candidate but the candidate who sounded most strong and competent.

As well as age a deeper voice can indicate higher levels of testosterone. It is likely then that this love of deeper voices is an evolutionary thing, with a deeper voice indicating more primitively useful leadership qualities such as strength and physical ability. It seems that it is not the wisdom of age, more actually relevant to modern leadership, that a deeper voice is communicating.

Whether a deep-voiced politician actually makes a better leader is a subject for a whole other piece of research, but until then you can expect your pollies to keep pitching it low. You’d better not tell them about this piece of research because we’d rather they concentrate on what they say instead of how they say it.