Linking men‘s voice pitch to actual and perceived trustworthiness across domains

* Christoph Schild and Julia Stern share the first authorship. Previous research suggests that judgments about a male speaker’ s trustworthiness v ary due to the speaker’s voice pitch ( mean F0 ) and differ across domain s . M ixed results in terms of the direction and extent of such effects have been reported , however . Moreover, no study so far has investigated whether men’s mean F0 is , indeed, a valid cue to their self - reported and behavioral trustworthiness , and whether trustworthiness judgments are accurate. W e tested the relation between mean F0 and actual general, economic and mating - related trustworthiness in 181 men, as well as t rustworthiness judgments of 95 perceivers across all three domain s. Analyses show that men’s mean F0 is not related to Honesty - Humil ity (as a trait indicator of general trustworthiness) , t rustworthy intentions, or trust game behavior , suggesting no relation of mean F0 to general or economic trustworthiness. In contrast, results suggest that mean F0 might be related to mating - related trustworthiness (as indicated by self - reported relationship infidelity) . However, l ower mean F0 was judge d as more trustworthy in economic, but less trustworthy in mating - related domain s and rather weakly related to judgments of general trustworthiness . Trustworthiness j udgments were not accurat e for general or economic trustworthiness , b ut exploratory analyses sugges t that women might be able to accurately judge men’s relationship infidelity based on their voice pitch . Next to these analyses, w e report exploratory analyses involving and controlling for additional voice parameters .

Preregistration, open data, open analysis script and open material can be found here: https://osf.io/khua4/