It seems women know women better. They can easily spot the sound of a flirtatious rival, says a new study.
An international team of anthropologists, which has carried out the study, claims to have found evidence that women can tell from other women’s voices how much of a threat they pose to their relationships.
In their study, men who were played recordings of a range of women’s voices judged those with higher-pitched tones the most attractive — especially when asked to choose who they would favour for a one-night stand. When women listened to the same range of voices, they accurately predicted which would be the most appealing to the men.
The team, led by Pennsylvania State University, believes that higher voices in women may have evolved to sound youthful, flirty and attractive to prospective partners.
“These results support our prediction that women use vocal characteristics to track the threat potential of their competitors. They shed new light on how men choose and women compete for mates. We found that women were most threatened by a high, youthful-sounding voice in another woman,” said David Puts, who led the study, was quoted by The Daily Telegraph as saying. According to the researchers, actresses such as Renee Zellweger and Jennifer Tilly have the kind of voices that men would find attractive and women would find threatening. The findings, published in the Personality and Individual Differences journal, suggest that women’s high voices may signal youth and fertility to men who are listening, in the same way that men’s deep voices are believed to signal dominance.