Gender and Context-Specific Effects of Vocal Dominance and Trustworthiness on Leadership Decisions

Abstract

Objective

The evolutionary-contingency hypothesis, which suggests that preferences for leaders are context-dependent, has found relatively consistent support from research investigating leadership decisions based on facial pictures. Here, we test whether these results transfer to leadership decisions based on voice recordings. We examined how dominance and trustworthiness perceptions relate to leadership decisions in wartime and peacetime contexts and whether effects differ by a speaker’s gender. Further, we investigate two cues that might be related to leadership decisions, as well as dominance and trustworthiness perceptions: voice pitch and strength of regional accent.

Methods

We conducted a preregistered online study with 125 raters and recordings of 120 speakers (61 men, 59 women) from different parts in Germany. Raters were randomly distributed into four rating conditions: dominance, trustworthiness, hypothetical vote (wartime) and hypothetical vote (peacetime).

Results

We find that dominant speakers were more likely to be voted for in a wartime context while trustworthy speakers were more likely to be voted for in a peacetime context. Voice pitch functions as a main cue for dominance perceptions, while strength of regional accent functions as a main cue for trustworthiness perceptions.

Conclusions

This study adds to a stream of research that suggests that (a) people’s voices contain important information based on which we form social impressions and (b) we prefer different types of leaders across different contexts. Future research should disentangle effects of gender bias in leadership decisions and investigate underlying mechanisms that influence how people’s voices contribute to achieving social status.