Your Cheatin’ Voice Will Tell on You: Detection of Past Infidelity from Voice

Abstract

Evidence suggests that many physical, behavioral, and trait qualities can be detected solely from the sound of a person's voice, irrespective of the semantic information conveyed through speech. This study examined whether raters could accurately assess the likelihood that a person has cheated on committed, romantic partners simply by hearing the speaker's voice. Independent raters heard voice samples of individuals who self-reported that they either cheated or had never cheated on their romantic partners. 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. We found that participants indeed rated the voices of those who had a history of cheating as more likely to cheat. Male speakers were given higher ratings for cheating, while female raters were more likely to ascribe the likelihood to cheat to speakers. Additionally, we manipulated the pitch of the voice samples, and for both sexes, the lower pitched versions were consistently rated to be from those who were more likely to have cheated. Regardless of the pitch manipulation, speakers were able to assess actual history of infidelity; the one exception was that men's accuracy decreased when judging women whose voices were lowered. 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.

Impressions of sexual unfaithfulness and their accuracy show a degree of universality

“…Across studies, we examined potential mediators of any accuracy in unfaithfulness judgments, chosen based on previous studies. These included perceptions of attractiveness, as people may infer that more attractive individuals will have more opportunity to be unfaithful, and perceptions of masculinity, which is a valid cue to unfaithfulness in men [ 10 , 25 ]. We also included untrustworthiness judgments, to confirm that accuracy is specific to unfaithfulness, as found in previous studies [ 9 , 10 ], rather than reflecting more general impressions of untrustworthiness.…”

The Sound of Trust: Towards Modelling Computational Trust using Voice-only Cues at Zero-Acquaintance

“…The methodology undertaken in this research is similar to the methodology undertaken by Hughes and Harrison [19], Imhof [35] and Smith et al [36]. Participants were informed about the study procedure and given the option to opt out of the online survey at any point of time.…”

“…In [19] it is noted that pitch has a small role in detecting cheating probability of infidelity among committed romantic partners, but it does not represent the entire picture. Hughes and Harrison [19] did not consider other acoustical measures or any combination of different acoustic measures in the research.…”

Towards Modelling Trust in Voice at Zero Acquaintance

“…One such example of user affect could potentially be trust. [36] has observed the likelihood that an individual has cheated on committed, romantic partners simply by hearing 10 seconds the speaker's voice. In addition to comparing the original voice samples of male and female voices against each other, they also manipulated the pitch of the voice samples to identify and link between the difference in pitch and the likelihood of cheating.…”

“…They also observed that both males and females with a manipulated lower pitch had higher cheating ratings than those with manipulated higher pitch. As [36] noted, pitch does play a role in detecting infidelity, but it does not represent the entire picture, since raters were still able to identify cheaters by only using very thin slices of vocal information.…”