Highlights
Alumni Profile: David Puts
NPR recently featured David Puts's research on sexual selection and sex differences in human voice pitch. According to his experiments, men with deeper voices may have more luck in attracting members of the opposite sex.
Puts once observed some interesting behavior in a mall food court. "I overheard a couple of guys behind me who seemed to be trying to speak in as deep and booming a voice as they could muster." He turned around and saw an attractive young woman sitting near them. It became clear to him that the teenagers were competing to talk in deeper voices in order to impress the girl.
Is a deep voice a kind of mating call? To find out, Puts recorded men introducing themselves to compete for a hypothetical lunch date with an attractive woman. He manipulated the pitch of the recordings and asked women and men to listen to them. The women fell for the deeper voices while the male listeners found them intimidating.
Puts, a PhD graduate in biological anthropology, continues to study the role of sexual selection on voice as a neuroscience postdoc at Michigan State University. He is also interested in sex differences in spatial problem solving ability and in the development of sexual orientation.
Listen to the "Science Out of the Box" installment on NPR that features David Puts's research.
Visit David Puts's Web site at the Breedlove Jordan Lab at MSU.
