Both men and women can accurately assess a man’s upper body strength based on his voice alone:
A team led by Aaron Sell at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recorded the voices of more than 200 men from the US, Argentina, Bolivia and Romania, who all repeated a short phrase in their native tongue. Sell’s team also put the men through a battery of tests of upper body strength.
When university students listened to the recordings, they accurately predicted the strength of the men, based on a seven-point scale from “weak” to “strong” — regardless of the language used. The voice analysis provided just as much information about a speaker’s strength as photographs.