Truly, madly, deeply

The Herald has a story on extra-marital affairs (no, not that one), headlined “Men with deep voices sexier, but more likely to cheat – study”

Scientists found that men with masculine, low-pitched voices are better at attracting women – at least those looking for short-term flings.

But the baritone bad boys were also seen as more likely to cheat and not viewed as marriage material.

When you track down the actual research and look at the paper

Women selected lower-pitched men’s voices as more attractive for a short-term relationship (t₈₆ = 6.74, p < .001; M = .70, SD = .279), as more attractive for a long-term relationship (t₈₆ = 5.66, p < .001, M = .67, SD = .277), and as more likely to cheat on their romantic partner (t₈₆ = 5.64, p < .001, M = .68, SD = .298), on a proportion of trials that was significantly greater than chance.

So, firstly, the headline is completely unsupported by the research: there is no information about actual propensity to cheat, just about what women thought about the men based solely on voice recordings.  Second, men with lower-pitched voices were also seen as more attractive, not less attractive, for a long term relationship.

What the research found that’s at least somewhat related to the story is that the advantage of deep voices was smaller in the context of long-term than short-term relationships. The problem is that this sort of difference of differences is quite sensitive to how you summarise your data — a switch from differences to ratios, for example, can easily cause it to reverse.

The story was originally from the Daily Mail. Sex, like cancer, is one of the topics where the Mail is especially untrustworthy