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PARIS: Voters are more likely to choose candidates with a deeper voice -- whether male or female -- new research by US scientists showed Wednesday.
When asked to pick a hypothetical political candidate on the basis of their voice, voters consistently choose the option with the deeper voice, according to the study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
While previous research has hinted that voters may have such a preference, earlier experiments used the recorded voices of former US presidents, leading to the possiblity that participants recognised the voices and made their choices based on political preferences.
Previous research also did not include female voices in the voters’ assessment.
In the experiments, researchers asked participants to listen to recorded voices saying “I urge you to vote for me this November.” The recordings were digitally manipulated to create pairs of higher and lower pitch, and participants were asked to choose which voice they would vote for in an election.
In a separate experiment, participants were also asked to rate other properties of the voices, such as competence and trustworthiness.
“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,” said Casey Klofstad, associate professor of political science at the University of Miami.
“Women are vastly under-represented in leadership positions across the globe,” Klofstad said, adding: “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.”
The scientists said that “the selection of leaders is often made based on impressionistic judgements.” Their research therefore “suggests that voice perception could be one of the factors that voters take into account,” the study said.
The research was conducted by Klofstad with Rindy C. Anderson and Susan Peters, research associates in the biology department of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
