If your partner has cheated on you, new research suggests you can call them out just by listening to their voice.
Scientists can’t pinpoint exactly how we pick up on infidelity through someone’s speech.
They suspect, however, that greater variation in pitch, better voice quality, and fewer silent pauses may all be indications.
Our in-built ‘cheat detector’ is so accurate, they say, that people can even pick up on infidelity when they hear a stranger talking.
Researchers recommended speaking to someone on the phone before going on a date, explaining that just hearing someone talk can reveal a huge amount about them.
The voice is a cheater detection tool and listening to how someone talks even if they’re a total stranger could reveal if they’ve been unfaithful, the study found (stock image)
According to research from Albright college and Penn State University, people’s voices convey a lot of information about them such as their sex, race and personality – regardless of the content of what they say.
It even conveys information about a person’s weight, height and if they have a symmetrical face, writes Washington Post.
Scientists studied a database of males and females counting from one to ten and participants listened to their voices.
‘To control for aspects that may clue a listener to the speaker’s mate value, we used voice samples that did not differ between these groups for voice attractiveness, age, voice pitch, and other acoustic measures’, researchers said in their study, published in Evolutionary Psychology.
Half the male and female speakers had had sexual intercourse with someone outside of a relationship at some point.
The other half said they had never cheated on their partners.
Researchers asked 152 people to rate each voice sample for the likelihood the person had cheated.
Participants rated the voices on the likelihood of them cheating – not at all likely to cheat (1) to very likely to cheat (10).
‘We found that participants indeed rated the voices of those who had a history of cheating as more likely to cheat’, researchers wrote.
‘Male speakers were given higher ratings for cheating, while female raters were more likely to ascribe the likelihood to cheat to speakers.’
The team believe using voice to detect if a partner has been cheating may have important implications for mating success in evolutionary terms (stock image)
They believe this is because women are generally more suspicious of men.
‘A lowered voice may be a signal of testosterone and linked to sex drive, which leads people to think they are more likely to cheat,’ they researchers said.
Scientists also manipulated the pitch of voice samples and regardless speakers were still able to assess their infidelity.
However, the one exception was that men’s accuracy decreased when judging women whose voices were lower.
‘These findings expand upon the idea that the human voice may be of value as a cheater detection tool and very thin slices of vocal information are all that is needed to make certain assessments about others’, researchers said.
‘While we cannot exactly pinpoint all the features about a voice that our perceptual system is using to make this assessment, we know that pitch plays a role, but does not represent the entire picture’.
They also found extroverts had greater voice quality and fewer silent pauses – which was also a strong indicator of infidelity.
The team believe using voice to detect if a partner has been cheating may have important implications for mating success in evolutionary terms.
‘Other vocal cues such as clarity of articulation may have also contributed to perceptions of infidelity.
‘For example, masculine males tend to display less clarity in their speech and show phonetic patterns indicative of masculinity, which in turn could be associated with infidelity threat.’