If your voice has this pitch, it could mean you have these personality traits

Never judge a book by its cover, but what about judging a person by their voice? It doesn’t sound like a great way to assess somebody, but a new study finds your voice may indeed provide a peek into your personality.

Researchers from the University of Göttingen say people with a lower-pitched voice are often associated with more dominant tendencies, extraversion, and even increased interest in socio-sexuality (casual sex, sex outside of a relationship). This held up among both men and women.

“People’s voices can make a huge and immediate impression on us,” explains study author Dr. Julia Stern, from the University of Göttingen’s Biological Personality Psychology Group. “Even if we just hear someone’s voice without any visual clues – for instance on the phone – we know pretty soon whether we’re talking to a man, a woman, a child or an older person.”

Data on over 2,000 people from four different countries were analyzed for this project. Each person filled out a series of surveys gauging their personality traits and submitted a recording of themselves speaking. That last part is quite notable because it’s the first time such an approach has been used in a scientific project.

In the past, researchers have relied on simply classifying voices as “deep” or “high pitched.” Meanwhile, socio-sexuality was measured by asking each individual about their personal sexual behaviors, attitudes, and desires.

“We can pick up on whether the person sounds interested, friendly, sad, nervous, or whether they have an attractive voice. We also start to make assumptions about trust and dominance,” Dr. Stern adds. “The first step was to investigate whether voices are, indeed, related to people’s personality. And our results suggest that people do seem to express some aspects of their personality with their voice.”

Additional datasets were also collected on each person to help determine levels of neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, dominance, agreeableness, and conscientiousness.

Besides the aforementioned findings regarding a deeper voice and a proclivity toward dominance, extraversion, and a more “free-spirited” approach to sex, researchers say the connection between voice and personality is still quite unclear. No consistent connections were found between voice and measures of agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness, or openness.

While these findings are fascinating and contribute to humanity’s constantly growing understanding of the interconnected nature of the human body, it probably isn’t a good idea to start going around judging everyone based on their voice. These are initial, preliminary findings that require much more work before any conclusions can be made.

Still, this study was put together as a “registered report,” meaning it underwent additional peer reviews early on in the research phase. This process is intended to increase the accuracy of scientific research and studies, which further strengthens its findings. 

The next time you’re trying to get a “read” on someone, keep this study in mind. Ultimately, though, remember actions are the true indicator of anyone’s personality or true colors.

The full study can be found here, published in the Journal of Research in Personality.