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REAL LIFE NEWS: DEEP VOICES GARNER MORE VOTES

by Hazed

Here’s a report that election candidates everywhere should pay attention to: voters are more likely to pick the candidate that has the deeper voice.

Researchers made recordings of seventeen women and ten men saying the phrase, “I urge you to vote for me this November,” and then altered the pitch of the subjects’ voices electronically, changing to pitch to make a pair of recordings for each subject, one higher than the original and the other lower.

Both were then played to the “voters” in the study who, after listening, more frequently voted for the subject with the lower voice, regardless of whether they were male or female.

Casey Klofstad, one of the authors of the study from the Department of Political Science at the University of Miami said “Candidates already know about this and they have been using vocal coaches to enhance their electability and what we have done is proven the folk wisdom that the structure of the human voice matters and actually shown that scientifically.”

Duke University in North Carolina was also involved in the study and Rindy Anderson said: “It’s clear that our voices carry more information than the words we speak. Knowing this can help us understand the factors that influence our social interactions and possibly why there are fewer women elected to high-level political positions.”

The researchers want to extend their study by moving out of the lab to test their findings in real elections.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17355013

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