How Vocal Pitch Sells the Self

In business, politics and daily life, we instinctively scan for cues to help us understand who’s in charge and how to navigate our surroundings. When identifying leaders, we tend to look for signs of confidence and competence—whether in how someone dresses or through non-verbal signals like posture and body language.

One cue that often flies under the radar is voice. Research tells us the pitch of a person’s voice can significantly influence how we perceive their leadership abilities. People tend to gravitate toward lower-pitched, deep voices (think James Earl Jones in one of his many leading roles), versus someone with a higher pitched voice (like Reese Witherspoon in her role as Elle Woods in Legally Blonde).

“Pitch is interesting,” says Jillian O’Connor, an adjunct collaborating with researchers in the Department of Psychology at Queen’s University. “It’s something that’s biologically based, and in day-to-day life it’s kind of subtle, but it’s something that can have really powerful effects on how we are approached in the world.” 

O’Connor has long studied the social perceptions of how we sound and how our voices affect the way someone might approach or respond based on it. Her work, which fits into a wider body of research about voice pitch and social perceptions, has explored topics such as voice pitch and political electability and connections between pitch and vocal attractiveness.

The voice of trust 

When conducting research, O’Connor often employs voice recordings, which are artificially manipulated to sound higher or lower pitched; all other aspects of the voice, such as accent and rhythm, are kept the same. Research participants are then asked to rate the resulting voices within the specific context of each research project’s focus.

It’s a technique she’s leveraged in a number of studies, including one exploring perceptions of trustworthiness in various social contexts. In romantic situations, for example, her research indicates that men with low-pitched voices are perceived as less trustworthy.

While her studies haven’t specifically focused on the impact of vocal pitch in the workplace, O’Connor says the research would indicate that low-pitched voices are favoured in those who hold leadership positions.

“We have this perceptual bias that low pitch means large. So when you think of a larger creature, that’s someone who might be in charge of things,” says O’Connor. “There’s also this relationship with testosterone and lower pitched voices in men, and higher levels of testosterone are associated with people striving for status, acting in more dominant ways and acting in ways that we would think a leader should act.”

But when someone wants a colleague they can trust and work cooperatively with, male and female high-pitched speakers are preferred. These perceptions remain the same, whether the listener is male or female.

Altering voice pitch

Interestingly, O’Connor says it is common for people to subconsciously lower their pitch when in a workplace environment. She points to a study that found both male and female experts tend to drop their pitch when speaking in front of an audience. However, O’Connor doesn’t advise male or female high-pitched speakers to purposely deepen their voices to be perceived as a leader—like Theranos founder Elzabeth Holmes was believed to have done.

“If you want to be a leader,” she says, “you should show that through your work ethic, through your relationships and how you interact with colleagues.”

When it comes to perception of voice, O’Connor says it should fall on senior leaders and colleagues to be more aware of their biases and perceptions of co-workers with high-pitched voices. “I don’t recommend that the speaker themselves change their voice, but that the listener takes a step back.” 

She recommends listeners try to be mindful of their gut reactions. A useful exercise would be to stop and think about how their colleagues’ ideas or suggestions might sound if they came from someone with a lower pitched voice – or if it was in written form. 

“One of the things I’m really interested in right now [are] these perceptions and whether we can we work against them and overcome them,” she says. “All of the research so far has really been predicated on the idea that these are automatic perceptions, but we don’t have any evidence of that just yet.”

Looking ahead, O’Connor would also like to dig deeper into the perceptions of AI voice agents–something that is becoming more and more common in the workplace and our day-to-day lives. There is a growing body of research that suggests women’s voices are preferred as AI voice agents, such as Apple’s digital assistant Siri.

O’Connor is interested in expanding on this research. Are gender stereotypes of women being more nurturing and kinder than men fuelling this preference? Are men more inclined to listen to a female AI voice because it is less likely to sound combative?

 “There does seem to be this female-leaning preference when it comes to AI voices, and I really think that’s rooted in gender stereotypes.”