The Sound of Your Voice May Determine Whether People View You as a Leader

How charismatic is your voice? Do you sound authoritarian or benevolent? While you may not think that the sound of a person's voice can impact the perceptions of others, you'd be wrong. It turns out that how you sound can greatly influence how others view you.

When a right-wing Italian politician named Umberto Bossi suffered a stroke in 2004, his speech patterns changed permanently. Surprisingly, though, the public's perception also changed. His followers, while viewing him as authoritarian before, began to view him as benevolent.

Intrigued by this phenomenon, scientists decided to probe the vocal presence of charisma across cultural divides.

Charismatic voices are made up of two fundamental components: one biological and one based on language and culture. The biological component of charismatic voice is innate and consists of a speaker's manipulation of changes in fundamental frequency to be recognized as a group leader. By using a process of speech synthesis called "delexicalization," it is possible to remove the subjective influence of a speech's content, allowing a researcher to study the biological component in a controlled fashion.

"You get rid of the words and try to keep the acoustic patterns," said Rosario Signorello, one of the researchers, in a news release. "You keep the F0 frequency, the intensity and duration, with no alteration to the other spectral and acoustic parameters."

The F0 frequency is the rate of vocal fold vibration as measured in Hertz. In this case, the researchers found that pitch contour had a huge influence on how people were perceived. They found that a listener's perception of a speaker as dominant and threatening can be attributed to their use of an average low F0 voice and wide pitch range. In contrast, the use of an average higher F0 and narrow pitch range conveyed sincere and reassuring leadership. That said, culture also played a role.

"The Italians seem to need a low pitched voice, and the French a high pitched one, because of cultural reasons," said Signorello. "The Italians seem to want a more dominant leader, and the French a more competent leader."

Currently, scientists plan to do future studies concerning the voice of leadership in non-human primates. This may help show how nonhuman primate individuals emerged and were recognized by the group as leaders.

The findings were presented at the 168^th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA).