You can tell whether someone is a cheater just from their voice - and it's baffled scientists

Credit: Antonio Guillem (Credit:Antonio Guillem)

A study suggests that you can tell if someone has been unfaithful - just from the sound of their voice.

Evidence shows that a person's voice could actually be used as "a cheater detection tool", no matter how good their cover story is.

As part of the study, individuals heard samples of voices from individuals who either said they had cheated or didn't cheat on their significant others, and were instructed to give them ratings on whether they could be trusted.

According to The Conversation, the vocal samples came from individuals who had "similar pitch and attractiveness, who were of similar size and shape, and had similar sexual histories (aside from cheating)."

Those who had a history of cheating were rated as more likely to be unfaithful.

And even when the speakers' voices were manipulated (to remove factors such as pitch from the judgements) people were able to accurately conclude when there was really a history of cheating.

The study says: "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.

"We were unable to identify exactly which acoustic qualities were driving the perception of cheating ascriptions, albeit a detailed acoustical analysis beyond the aims and scope of this perceptual study.

"It is interesting, then, to speculate what aspects of the human voice raters were using to make these accurate assessments because we eliminated differences between groups for the more conspicuous cues of a voice that could be driving factors (i.e., variations in vocal attractiveness, voice pitch, and other basic acoustic features).

"While evidence shows that a voice can be used to assess various traits and behaviours, the acoustic parameters that allow for these various voice assessments are largely unknown."

It has been speculated that some as-yet unidentified factors could be “leaking” information about one’s history of infidelity, for example clarity of articulation (masculine men are far less clear, apparently).

Alternatively, those who strike us as extroverts from their speech alone may be triggering our lizard brains - high extroversion is strongly correlated with infidelity risk.