While we all wish we could tell whether someone was a cheater just by looking at them, that’s not always the case. But believe it or not, a new study suggests you may be able to pick out a cheater by the sound of his or her voice.
A study recently published in "Evolutionary Psychology" suggests that the sound of a person’s voice could reveal a lot about someone, including whether they will remain faithful or whether they'll be a cheater.
Participants in the study were asked to listen to the voices of 10 men and 10 women, with half of each sex being people who have admitted to stepping out on a relationship at some point, and the other half having never cheated. All the voices were simply counting from one to ten, and all were shared in two different pitches to see if pitch had any affect on being able to identify cheaters.
And it turns out, when the participants were asked to rate the voices of those they thought more likely to cheat, more likely than not, they correctly identified cheaters vs. non cheaters. Pitch didn’t seem to make much of a difference in the study, although male participants did tend to rate women with lower-pitched voices more likely to cheat, possibly because they thought the voice sounded sexier. Interestingly, women were more likely to label the male voices as cheaters, possibly because women are in general more suspicious of men.
- As for why this is the case, the authors of the study aren’t sure but they suggest it could be because people with certain traits could be more prone to cheating, and those people, like extroverts, ”show greater variation in fundamental frequency, greater voice quality,” which make it easier to identify.
Source: The Washington Post