Deep Voices Make Men Seem Stronger, But Not More Attractive

A deep voice can make a man seem like he would win a fight, even when viewers can see his actual build. Attractiveness is another matter, according to a recent study.

Psychologists James E. Rutter and Lynda G. Boothroyd of Durham University in England filmed men of varying heights, weights and builds, then digitally raised or lowered the pitch of their voices in full-body videos. Lower pitches consistently made the men look tougher, but the lift in attractiveness that earlier audio-only studies reported did not show up once the men were visible.

Research that played only voice recordings had long found that lower pitches make men sound both tougher and more appealing, a pattern that shaped theories about how the male voice evolved. With full-body video, lowering pitch still made men seem stronger, better at fighting and more socially dominant, regardless of how big or small the man on screen was. Attractiveness, though, did not follow a steady deeper-is-better pattern. Viewers mainly marked down the most feminine-sounding voices, and deeper-than-average voices earned no clear edge.

Deeper voices also nudged viewers toward guessing that a man weighed more, though not that he was taller, which may help explain why a low voice reads as physically imposing. Published in Royal Society Open Science, the study is among the first to test voice edits on full-body video rather than on sound alone.

Testing a deep voice on full-body video

Researchers recruited 18 men, ages 19 to 32, all with British accents, partly through a local rowing club and a university powerlifting society to capture a range of body types. Weights ran from about 103 to 283 pounds, and heights from roughly 5 feet 5 inches to 6 feet 4 inches. Each man was filmed head to toe in a studio, wearing the same white T-shirt and black trousers, counting from one to five in a neutral tone. One man’s footage was dropped for poor audio quality, leaving 17.

Voice-editing software then produced 12 versions of each video. Pitch was set to one of four levels, from 75 hertz (very deep) to 135 hertz (high), with 115 hertz labeled average. Separately, each clip’s formant frequencies, which reflect the resonance of the vocal tract and shape how deep a voice sounds beyond its pitch, were shifted to sound more masculine, unchanged or more feminine. Four pitches multiplied by three formant settings made a dozen versions.

Nearly 1,500 adults, ages 18 to 36 and all U.S. nationals, were recruited through the online platform Prolific. Each person saw only one version of each man, chosen at random, so the voice edits would not stand out across repeat viewings. Every participant rated a single trait: attractiveness, fighting ability, physical strength or social dominance. Heterosexual women rated attractiveness, men rated the two physical traits, and a mixed-gender group rated social dominance, framed as how “respected and influential” a man seemed among his peers.

Deep voice ratings: stronger and tougher, not more attractive

Across the board, lowering pitch and deepening formants raised how dominant a man appeared. Men came across as stronger, better at fighting and more socially influential, and the pattern held regardless of how tall or heavy the man actually was. Some researchers had predicted that seeing a real body would erase the voice’s influence. It did not, though the effect was modest: by the authors’ estimate, deepening a voice by 20 hertz raised the share of men a speaker was judged able to beat in a fight by about one percentage point. Small edges can still matter, the authors add, if looking formidable helps deter a fight in the first place.

Attractiveness told a different story. Ratings were not a steady case of deeper being better. Viewers rated the highest-pitched version (135 hertz) lower than every other pitch, and they rated feminized formants lower than both unchanged and masculinized ones. Neither the deep pitch (95 hertz) nor masculinized formants beat the average pitch (115 hertz) or unchanged formants, and the very deep pitch (75 hertz) was rated lower than the deep one.

Sight outweighed sound by a wide margin. When raters watched silent versions of the same clips, what they saw explained about 22% of the differences in attractiveness ratings, compared with roughly 1% for the voice edits. For physical strength, silent video accounted for nearly 38% of the differences, versus about 2% for voice. Social dominance was the one trait where voice counted for more, at nearly 5%, though visuals still led at about 12%.

A second experiment asked 542 men, recruited online, to estimate either the height or the weight of each man on video. Deeper voices led to heavier weight guesses but had no detectable effect on height guesses. Even the weight effect was small: about 0.34 kilograms (roughly three-quarters of a pound) for every 20-hertz drop in pitch. Small as that is, the authors note that combat sports typically divide fighters into weight classes only 3 or 4 kilograms wide, so a slight bump in apparent weight could tilt how formidable a man looks.

Deep voices and male competition in the evolution debate

Early research on the male voice focused on its appeal to women, which fed the idea that deep voices evolved through female choice. More recent work has argued that rivalry between men may have mattered more, and these results are consistent with that second view: a deep voice still signaled strength and social clout on video, while its romantic payoff faded. Ratings of videos cannot show which force actually shaped men’s voices, though. In the authors’ reading, the attractiveness boost seen in audio-only labs came from an aversion to feminized voices, not a preference for masculine ones. They also caution against reading too much into which kind of dominance mattered most, since almost nothing is known about how voice shapes social standing outside Western societies.

For men, a deep voice looks more like a signal of toughness than a romantic advantage, at least in viewers’ impressions on video and with raters mostly from the U.S. Whether that holds in other cultures, or in real conversations rather than five counted words, remains untested.