Can You Tell Someone Is a Cheater by the Sound of Their Voice?

Did he or she cheat? Well, listen closely.

A study suggests that you can tell if someone has been unfaithful by their voice. Wait, what?

Yes, your voice is now “a cheater detection tool,” and a test done on individuals who heard samples of voices from individuals claimed they had either cheated or were innocent, revealed a lot. All of the voices used in the study had similar pitch and attractiveness, and the people had similar sexual histories.”

Even crazier, when the speakers' voices were manipulated people were still able to accurately conclude when there was really a history of cheating. No hiding here.

“Evidence suggests that many physical, behavioral, and trait qualities can be detected solely from the sound of a person’s voice, irrespective of the semantic information conveyed through speech,” says the study. “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…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).”

Overall, the study determined that people could accurately assess the likelihood that a person has cheated on committed, romantic partners simply by hearing the speaker’s voice.

“We found that participants indeed rated the voices of those who had a history of cheating as more likely to cheat. Male speakers were given higher ratings for cheating,” said the study.

And be on the lookout for low pitch. Those voices were consistently rated to be from those who were more likely to have cheated.

Dirty John Season 1 premieres Sunday, Nov 20 at 10/9c.