When deciding who to trust in financial situations, people tend to favor those with higher-pitched voices—even when there’s a risk of losing money. A new study published in the British Journal of Psychology finds that listeners consistently preferred partners with higher-pitched voices when playing economic trust games and were more generous toward those voices, regardless of the specific financial stakes involved.
The research was conducted by Jillian J. M. O’Connor, an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Downtown. O’Connor set out to resolve a puzzling contradiction in earlier studies. Past research has shown mixed results regarding whether higher- or lower-pitched voices are seen as more financially trustworthy. Some studies suggested higher pitch increased trust, while others reported the opposite. O’Connor suspected that the level of financial risk in each scenario might explain these inconsistencies and designed a series of experiments to test this idea directly.
“The sound of our voice can have a big impact on how other people view us, such as whether we are seen as attractive, authoritative, or trustworthy,” O’Connor explained. “I was interested in whether the sound of our voices can also change people’s behavior, particularly when it comes to financial decisions.”
“I’m interested in who we trust with money because we make these types of decisions every day. It might be as small as whether you lend a friend $5, or as significant as whether you are approved for a loan of $500,000. Either way, we frequently make trust-based financial decisions, and I study how these decisions could be led astray by something as simple as the sound of our voice.”
For her study, O’Connor recruited 118 undergraduate students and asked them to evaluate 48 different voices that had been digitally modified to be slightly higher or lower in pitch. These recordings included both male and female speakers who said either simple vowel sounds or the word “hello.” The pitch adjustments were subtle but sufficient to be noticeable and realistic.
Participants engaged in a series of economic trust games where they had to make decisions about giving money to others based only on how those others sounded. In one version of the game, a speaker could choose to split money equally or unequally, representing a relatively low-risk situation. In another, a speaker could return any amount of tripled money they received, making it a higher-risk investment for the listener.
In both types of games, listeners consistently preferred the voices with higher pitch. They were more likely to select those speakers as their financial partners and sent more money to them. This held true for both male and female voices and did not depend on whether the game involved low or high financial risk. These results ran counter to the idea that lower-pitched voices, which often convey dominance or authority, might be seen as safer bets when money is on the line.
Interestingly, when listeners were asked to judge how likely a voice was to take financial risks—such as gambling or investing in the stock market—they perceived lower-pitched voices as more prone to risky behavior.
In a twist, the study also explored what happens when roles are reversed. When listeners imagined themselves as the recipients of money from someone else (the “responder” in the trust game), they were asked how much they would return to that person. Once again, speakers with higher-pitched voices received more generous responses. Listeners tended to return more money to them than to those with lower-pitched voices.
“In one part of this study, participants were asked how much money they would return if they were given varying amounts of money by different speakers,” O’Connor told PsyPost. “Each round of this financial exchange was with a different speaker, and there were no repercussions for choosing not to return any money. In fact, the less money participants returned, the more they would have themselves.”
“As this was the first time such behavior has been experimentally tested in reference to voice pitch, I was quite surprised that listeners returned more money to speakers with higher-pitched rather than lower-pitched voices. We might usually think that how we act with money comes down to personal traits, such as being conscientious, honest, or frugal. In contrast, these results suggest that the other person in the financial exchange is a factor that explains how fair we are in our financial dealings.”
This finding challenges the idea that deeper voices inspire more confidence across the board. In fact, it hints at a more nuanced social logic. While lower-pitched voices might signal power, strength, or dominance, higher-pitched voices may convey warmth or a greater willingness to cooperate—qualities that appear to matter when people are considering reciprocity or selecting cooperative partners.
“We might think that our financial behavior is logical and calculated, but my research in this area shows that our behavior can be swayed by subtle forces, such as voice pitch,” O’Connor explained. “We might not think that how our voices sound could impact our ability to, say, secure a loan, but my work shows that this very factor changes whether we are seen as likely to take financial risks. In essence, my research highlights the subtle influences that can impact who we trust—or don’t trust—with money.”
Despite these insights, the study has limitations. All of the decisions were hypothetical—participants weren’t playing with real money. While earlier work has shown that people behave similarly in imagined and real-money versions of trust games, it’s possible that some responses might differ in higher-stakes situations.
The participant pool also skewed young and female, which could affect generalizability. Most were college students in their late teens or early twenties, and very few were older adults or from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Other research suggests older adults may evaluate trust and risk differently, so future studies should include a more diverse range of ages and experiences.
Still, the results offer a fresh perspective on how subtle vocal cues shape social decisions. While deep voices often dominate leadership roles or signal confidence, when it comes to financial trust, people seem more inclined to place their money with those who sound more cooperative—even if that cooperation comes from a higher pitch.
“The next step in my line of research is to see if the influence of voice pitch on financial behavior is something that listeners are conscious of, or whether it is a gut-level reaction,” O’Connor said. “This is an important next step because these findings suggest that, for example, the sound of a potential borrower’s voice could impact whether they are approved for a loan. If so, then it’s critical to find ways to reduce the impact of superficial cues, like voice pitch, on financial decisions. This starts with first understanding whether this voice-based bias is more reflective or more reflexive.”
“It’s important to note that this study is all about perception,” she added. “We think that people with higher-pitched voices are more trustworthy when it comes to money, but that doesn’t make it so. There is currently no evidence to suggest that a person’s financial behavior is predicted by the sound of their voice.”
The study, “Higher-pitched voices are perceived as financially trustworthy,” was published June 2, 2025.
