Lower-pitched voices attract more votes

There is a fair amount of interest at the moment in the forthcoming film about Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady, with Meryl Streep playing the former prime minister. There was a clip from it on Radio 4's Today programme a couple of days ago to accompany a piece on voices, and how researchers have found that voters prefer their politicians to have a low-pitched voice.

 

Dr Cara Tigue from McMaster University in Ontario and her team of researchers manipulated recordings of speeches of US presidents, so that the same speech could be played in both a higher-pitched and lower-pitched voice. An average male voice is around 120 hertz, and the researchers altered this by around 20 hertz up or down. Participants who listened to the speeches were asked to say which speaker they would prefer to vote for, and generally they chose the one with the lower-pitched voice. This matches previous research studies where participants tended to find deeper male voices more attractive. Dr Tigue said that deeper voices are linked to higher testosterone levels - which is seen as positive.

 

You can hear the radio interviewer and clip of Meryl Streep for a few more days here.

When this post is published I shall be in Dubrovnik, Croatia - I'm going for a few days. I've got a couple of short posts programmed to appear over the weekend.

Comments

[John]

This reminds me of a long-term quandry over voice annunciators in aircraft cockpits wherein there would be a voice "alarm" in place of, or in addition to a tone. It seemed for a while that we were headed toward female voices because they were believed to be more easily understood. There was also a belief that female voices were more likely to be listened to in an era when most pilots were male.

That trend never got much traction and standardisation never caught on. Now, there are systems that only have male, only female, or use both. Interestingly, there is a theory that male voices are more effective for urgent direction like "pull up, pull up", and female voices are more effective in informational announcements, and therefore use both.

It's interesting that across a user base as massive as the global aviation community - civil and military - there has never been a true standard convention. Perhaps there is no correlation between high-low, female-male and effectiveness of message delivery. Just a thought.

[Jemmy Hope]

I'm of the opinion that broadcaster Kirstie Young could announce the outbreak of World War III and I'd think, "Oh, that's OK then".

[Jemmy Hope]

... or KIRSTY Young, if you're good at spelling names.

[Virtual Linguist]

Thanks, both, for your comments. I did once write a post on male vs female voices in announcements. It's here http://virtuallinguist.typepad.com/the_virtual_linguist/2008/10/mind-the-gap-and-other-announcements.html#tp

[John]

Just looked at your prior post. There certainly seems to be a preference for the female voice in the UK.

Also enjoyed the prior post hyperlinked at the top of the page on Jamaican patois.

Thanks.