Study Says Deep-Voiced Men Are More Likely to Cheat

In news that is really not terribly surprising for anyone familiar with the sexy, deep-voiced Don Draper archetype, a recent study has suggested men with low voices are more likely to cheat.

The study, conducted by Chinese researchers and published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found that deep-voiced, traditionally “masculine” sounding men are “more likely to engage in infidelity” than their higher-voiced counterparts.

Researchers arrived at this conclusion by surveying a group of heterosexual, Mandarin-speaking university students — including 116 men and 145 women — and recording their voices to determine pitch. Participants were then asked to rank how likely they were to remain faithful to a romantic partner on a scale of one to seven. While the study revealed no strong correlation between female voice pitch and cheating tendencies, men with deeper voices did tend to report a greater propensity for infidelity.

This, researchers surmised, may be because deep voices in men “enhance their status among other men or their attractiveness to women, thereby increasing their chances of obtaining more or higher-quality partners.” In other words, men know their deep voices are sexy, and they’re not about to squander that high sexual market value on faithful monogamy.

A previous study from 2013 also suggested a link between deep voices and infidelity, as well as women’s attraction to both. In that study, women reported being more attracted to men with deeper voices, and that attraction only increased the more likely they thought the guy was to cheat.

Meanwhile, there’s also some biological grounding to these findings. Lower voices tend to indicate higher testosterone levels, which have a tendency to “interfere with romantic relationship functioning” by encouraging stereotypical seed-spreading promiscuity in men, according to the study’s researchers.