According to the latest research by US scientists, voters are more likely to pick candidates, male or female, who have a deeper voice.
The study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Science, asked voters to choose a political candidate and to base their decision on the candidate’s voice.
The voice recordings were digitally manipulated in order to create pairs of higher and lower pitch from which participants had to choose the one which they prefer.
In a following study, they had to rate other characteristics of the voices, like competence and trustworthiness.
Associate professor of political science at the University of Miami, Casey Klofstad commented on the results and said: “Our results raise the possibility that the electability of female candidates could be influenced by the fact that women tend to have higher-pitched voices than men.”
“Women are vastly under-represented in leadership positions across the globe. While gender discrimination is an obvious cause of the under-representation of women as leaders, our results suggest that biological differences between the sexes, and our responses to those differences, could potentially be an additional factor to consider, ” he added.
Previous research has shown similar results, but there were doubts if they were accurate as they used the recorded voices of US presidents, and participants could recognised the voices and choose accordingly to their political preferences.
This is also the first study which uses female voices.
Photo by wilfp
