A recent study out of the University of British Columbia found that we have a few strong preferences when it comes to voices:  we like voices similar to our own, we like men to use shorter words and women to use longer ones, and we like big, resonant voices – especially in men.  No one likes the vocal “fry” – the raspy tone at the ends of phrases currently in vogue amongst disaffected teens (“Whatever, Dr. Nick”) and women in the upper echelons of the social world (“Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint.”).  There also seems to be some anecdotal evidence, at least, that we like exotic foreign accents because they’re, well, exotic.

Speakers, take note.  It might be easiest for men to draw up a list of what you should avoid: stay away from a nasal whine and especially don’t whine long words.  Give us that big Ronald Reagan voice instead. Women, add a hint of a mysterious foreign accent to your breathy, highly educated locutions and you’re good to go.

More seriously, two points seem to me to jump out of this and similar research on the voice.  First of all, reactions to voices go very deep; they’re emotional and therefore largely governed by the unconscious mind.  That means that they are important in decision-making and liking and disliking, all of which happens at the unconscious level of the mind.

Second, we’re tribal in the way we react to voices; we start with our immediate families as infants and branch out to our neighborhoods and regions as we grow up.  And so a voice is an important key to identity for a speaker – and for her audience.  Famously, Mayor LaGuardia of New York City could address crowds in five languages, and changed according to the part of town he was campaigning in, thus displaying a canny sense of how to liken himself to voters of all kinds long before this study was done.

So speakers should think seriously about the tension between authenticity and aligning yourself with your audience.  Yes, you need to be yourself.  Audiences today crave authenticity and hate to be overtly marketed at under most circumstances.  By all means let us know if you’re from some hollow deep in the blue Kentucky hills and grew up sipping moonshine from your granpappy’s knee.  In fact, share that recipe with us.

But you also need to meet your audience halfway, or more than halfway.  In the end, we want to know who you are and where you’re from.  But we care even more about who we are and where we’re from.  Even more than understanding something new, we want to be understood.

So never think that being authentic means that you can give the same speech to every audience on the planet.  You need to learn enough of the customs of the local tribe – whether it’s entrepreneurs or salespeople or Silicon Valley hotshots – to speak a little of their language.  That’s not being inauthentic.  That’s just being courteous.

And showing that you understand a general truth about audiences:  we want to know what’s in it for us even more than we want to know what makes you tick.

A part of this post is adapted from my new book, Power Cues:  The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others, and Maximizing Your Personal Impact, published May 13, 2014 by Harvard. You can order it here.