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Accents Change How Physically Attractive We Find Others

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We Want People With Deeper Voices In Leadership Positions -- Even Women

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Nothing sounds more soothing to our ears than the silky bass of a deep voice. We love these baritone-voiced champions and, at their command, will cast their nasally, squealing counterparts into the gutter.

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A man familiar with gutters.

While the appeal of a man with a deep voice might sound obvious, it turns out that we prefer all our leaders, including women, to speak in a baritone. In one study, people listened to 20 "candidates" -- 10 men and 10 women -- campaigning for positions on a PTA or school board. All of the voices were manipulated to sound both high and low-pitched. Both men and women favored the female candidates with the deeper voices.

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Sith Lord and feared PTA tyrant.

A similar study found that CEOs who have deeper voices make more money, last longer in their jobs, and run larger companies. But, why is it that a deep voice gets a person so far in life? We aren't exactly sure, but one theory suggests that a lower voice implies that the speaker is stronger and more competent because of the larger torso that all strong and competent people are presumed to have. Another suggests it's because our voice lowers with age, implying that with age comes wisdom.

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We Invent Accents For People Who Don't Have Them

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And if you think you're in the clear just because you're a native-born English speaker with a perfectly unaccented voice, surprise, we're still going to get you. Because we won't just discriminate over how people speak, we'll discriminate over how we think they'll speak.

Linguists call this reverse linguistic stereotyping. When English speakers are told that someone isn't a native English speaker, they actually have greater difficulty understanding them, even if the person speaking doesn't have a foreign accent at all. We just up and decide that someone is totally unintelligible, a belief that doesn't get shoved aside by pesky little things such as actual evidence.

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"You have cancer."
"What? No speekee el Spanish-o. DO. YOU. TALK. EL. ENGLISH-O?"
"You have two weeks to live."

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An Accent Can Change The Meaning Of What Someone Says

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An accent can do more than change what you think of the speaker. It can change the actual meaning of what you're hearing.

At the University Of Southern California, researchers studied subjects' reactions to situations after priming them with voices using different accents. Specifically, participants were shown a group of fish and then asked whether they thought one fish was leading the group or being chased.

Journal of Language and Social Psychology
Is it Braveheart or The Blues Brothers?

Chinese-Americans, when presented with a Chinese accent, reported the lead fish as being chased. Hearing the Chinese accent put them in a mindset that reflected their Chinese heritage, which is more group-oriented. But, when Chinese-Americans were presented this scenario by someone speaking in an American accent, they saw the fish as a leader, reflecting American culture's passion for individualism and hunky, heroic fish.

And OK, that seems like it has limited practical effects outside the world of professional fish assayers. However, what was most interesting was that when this experiment was repeated on plain-vanilla Americans, hearing a foreign accent didn't make them consider a foreign cultural perspective more. It actually made them dig in harder to their American perspective -- they were even more likely to see the fish as a leader.

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Strangely, American listeners also strongly felt we should build a wall to keep foreign fish out.

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We Think Gay People Sound A Certain Way (And We're Wrong)

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Gay people face higher rates of workplace harassment, make less money, and can also be just straight-up fired for being gay in many states. There have been multiple cases of people losing their jobs at least partially due to their "gay accent."

A gay accent that might not actually exist.

Multiple studies have failed to find a correlation between lisps and sexuality in adolescent boys. Researchers attempting to see if voice correlates with sexuality asked adults to identify men as gay or straight based on the sound of their voices. Listeners reportedly thought that the voices of gay people were more high-pitched and melodious, but could identify the sexuality of subjects with a success rate only slightly better than at random. These studies found that what people believe is a "gay" voice is just one that sounds more feminine, and the studies theorize that our voice is influenced by environmental factors far more than our sexuality. If someone is raised by his mother, he will likely have a more feminine voice, regardless of his sexuality.

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"Got called into the boss's office today. Guess who's about to be raised by his mother again?"

So, where does this idea of the gay accent come from? The best guess linguists have is that it's a form of code-switching. Lots of people do this when they speak, adopting the same speaking patterns that their peers do. This can mean developing or shedding accents, using slang they wouldn't otherwise use, or, for gay men, adopting a campier speaking style when in their community.

So, there is a gay accent of sorts! It's just that not all gay men use it -- some straight men use it, and also, apparently, anyone can lose their job for it.

Nice work, everybody.

Kevin's parents said he wasn't living up to his potential, but even they had to admit they were wrong after they started following him on Twitter.

For more ways we don't understand our own mouth holes, check out 5 Ways You Didn't Realize The English Language Is Defective and 5 Reasons The English Language Makes No Freaking Sense.

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