Mac study finds men with lower-pitched voices more desirable to women

Abhi Mukherjee

The Silhouette

Jillian O’Connor from McMaster's department of psychology, neurosciences and behaviour found that men with lower pitched, masculine voices were more desirable to women. However, women considered these men to be faithful to them for only short-term relationships. generic for viagra O’Connor does her research in the Voice Research lab. It has taken two years for her to come up with her findings.

O’Connor’s paper about how men’s voices influence women’s perception of them has allowed her to find two perceptions that women have about men: attractiveness and infidelity. Women preferred lower pitched men’s voices for short-term relationships/one night stands. Women think that men with lower pitched voices are unfaithful for a romantic relationship.

“But this is what women think of men,” said O’Connor. “Men who are really attractive with these lower pitched voices don’t really have to be faithful in the long-term. They may be more successful if they follow a shot-term mating strategy, one where they don’t commit. So this is the case where women prefer men with lower pitched voices for short-term relationships but that is only if they think that they will not be faithful.”

She stated that “[women] know when men try to lower their voices to sound more attractive, it doesn’t work. Women don’t think that it is more attractive than their natural speaking voice,” which was a result of some prior research that O’Connor and her team had done. If in everyday life men start using a deeper voice, women will not find them attractive, suggesting that men cannot fake their voices to sound attractive because women have a natural way of sensing that.

“We have other senses, so when we see someone that we are attracted to, we take a lot of things into consideration like how they look, how they sound, how they smell, it’s a big picture,” said O’Connor, who wanted to clarify that voice is not the only quality that is used to assess human attraction. O’Connor takes a special interest in human sexual behaviour or behaviours within relationships which happens to be the motivation behind her research.

”Men with lower pitched voices have higher testosterone and hence they are more likely to cheat. But we don’t know that yet and that is something we would like to test in the future,” said O’Connor.

She said that this milestone of a finding would act as a stepping stone in addressing the bigger issue, that is how women choose their mates and how voices evolved to signal underlying qualities when it comes to romantic relationships. She hopes to figure out, in the future, if a man’s voice is an honest cue to his sexual behaviour or if women are off base on their deduction about a man’s sexual behaviour.