Science1 publisher2 min readPublished
Once raters could see the man, a deeper voice lifted only his dominance ratings
Durham psychologists who digitally lowered the voices of 17 filmed men found raters judged them stronger and more dominant but no more attractive. The authors take that as evidence that deep male voices evolved more to intimidate rivals than to win mates.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- Each man was filmed in full view counting from one to five, and his recording was digitally shifted up and down in pitch and resonance to make 12 versions.
- Hundreds of online volunteers watched the clips and rated each man for physical strength, fighting ability, dominance and attractiveness.
- In a second condition the videos were rated with no sound, and what volunteers could see moved their ratings far more than the voice changes did.
- A raised voice lowered a man's attractiveness ratings, while a lowered one gave no extra boost once raters could see his body.
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Why it matters
- contradiction Voice-only studies that found a deep-voice appeal may not describe how men are judged when they are also seen, since adding video erased that advantage here.
- decision Researchers testing whether low pitch helps men attract mates now have to justify audio-only stimuli, given that sight outweighed sound once raters had both.
- constraint Every body in the experiment came from just 17 men, so whether the pattern holds for other builds rests on a small sample of bodies, whatever the number of raters.
The silent condition is the most useful part of this design. Rating the same men with the sound off gives a baseline for what a body conveys by itself. The voice's contribution can then be measured on top of that baseline [6].
The voice manipulation also stayed within each man. His height, weight and build were fixed across his 12 clips, and only pitch and resonance moved [2][3]. Across 17 men that comes to 204 voiced clips [1]. "In other words, the men in the videos consistently appeared stronger, better at fighting and more influential as their vocal masculinity was increased," wrote James Rutter and Lynda Boothroyd, the Durham psychologists who ran the study [1][10].
Attractiveness is where the result departs from earlier work. "However, in a break from the literature, low voice pitch only improved perceptions of dominance, and not attractiveness, when accompanied by video," they wrote [11]. As phys.org describes the experiment, its two conditions are video with sound and video without [6]. The voice-only side of the contrast therefore comes from previous studies. The claim that seeing a body removes a deep voice's romantic advantage rests on comparing this experiment with earlier ones.
The study was built to ask whether body language and physical size change how people judge a voice [5]. In one sense the answer is yes. With a body on screen, a higher voice cost a man appeal and a lower one added none, while the lower voice still raised his dominance ratings [9][11]. The thing the published account doesn't tell you is whether a lowered voice did more for a tall, heavy man than for a slight one, how large any of the effects were, or whether the raters were men or women. The last of those matters for a hypothesis about attracting female mates [12].
I think the experiment supports a narrower claim than its conclusion. Present-day volunteers, watching men count from one to five on a screen, judged a lowered voice as tougher and no more appealing [2][9]. The authors read that as support for deep voices having evolved more to intimidate rivals than to attract mates [12]. Ratings of strangers online can favour one evolutionary hypothesis over another. They measure perception today, and the step back to selection in ancestral populations is the authors' inference. The paper appears in Royal Society Open Science [13].
What to watch
- Whether the full paper reports that a lowered voice worked differently for larger and smaller men, the interaction the study was set up to test.
- A replication that adds an audio-only arm using the same recordings, to test within one experiment whether visible bodies remove the attractiveness effect.
- Results broken out by rater sex, since the mate-attraction hypothesis is about how women judge men.