How altering voice pitch can make you appear more dominant or trustworthy

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. He and a group of researchers decided to investigate the “social code” of speech, by analysing the way in which different pitch variations in a person’s voice can make them instinctively appear more dominant or trustworthy. Writing in journal PNAS, the team used a method called “reverse correlation” to analyse how pitch variations impact social dynamics between individuals. They were then able to use this programme to generate thousands of pitch variations of the word “bonjour”, having already trialled the programme with the word “vraiment”. Two independent groups of participants, 44 people in total, were presented with hundreds of utterances of the French greeting pronounced with different pitch variations and spoken by either one male or one female speaker.