Study reveals:
What the voice says about the personality
Personality: What our voice says about you.
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We associate a lot with a person’s personality through their voice – but what does it really say about it? A study provides answers.
We know it: when we talk to a stranger on the phone or listen to a podcast, we almost automatically have an image of the person who is speaking to us in front of our inner eye. We imagine how old this person is, what gender they are, whether they are rather short or tall. We may even be able to tell if the person is happy, sad, nervous, interested, or bored.
And we think we can tell a person’s personality by their voice. But is that really possible? As a study at the University of Göttingen found that the voice can be traced back to certain personality traits – but not as many as we might sometimes think.
Personality: Are low voices really more dominant?
More than 2,000 participants were recruited for the study, whose voice pitch was digitally measured and sorted into “high” and “low”. Age and gender were also taken into account. The subjects also filled out questionnaires to measure their personality. They had to indicate how dominant, extroverted, neurotic, open-minded and conscientious they considered themselves to be. One of the aims of the study was to determine whether people with deep voices were more dominant, more extroverted and more sexually active.
According to the study results, people with a deeper voice are actually more likely to be dominant, extroverted, and more interested in sex outside of a relationship. Christoph Schild, a psychologist at the University of Siegen and part of the research team, classifies the results as follows: “Research currently assumes that differences in vocal depth can be a result of sexual selection.” It is assumed that the depth of the voice is an “honest signal” that should deter potential competition and appeal to partners.
The voice doesn’t tell us everything
“Our results indicate that people show certain aspects of their personality through their voice,” says Julia Stern from the Biological Personality Psychology group at the University of Göttingen.
However, no connection could be established between the voice and other personality traits. How open, neurotic, conscientious or agreeable a person is has little to do with the pitch or depth of the voice. And the pitch of the voice itself does not always allow large conclusions to be drawn about dominance, as Schild explains: “Mike Tyson is known for his rather high voice, but at the same time he is probably considered more of a dominant person.”
Sources used: dw.com, neurosciencenews.com, sciencedirect.com