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Brown Eyes Beat Blue Ones for 'Trustworthiness': Study

Features associated with having brown eyes, such as a round face, seem to signal reliability

By: Staff Writer

Posted: 01/10/2013 9:00 AM | Comments: 0

Features associated with having brown eyes, such as a round face, seem to signal reliability.

THURSDAY, Jan. 10 (HealthDay News) -- People with brown eyes are generally considered more trustworthy than those with blue eyes, a new study suggests.

Czech researchers asked study participants to look at men's and women's faces and to rate their trustworthiness based on two features, eye color and face shape. A large number of the participants said they considered people with brown eyes to be more trustworthy than those with blue eyes.

When it came to men, those who had round faces with larger mouths and chins were perceived as more trustworthy than those with narrow faces. Face shape did not affect how trustworthy women were judged to be, according to the study published online Jan. 9 in the journal PLoS One.

In another experiment, participants were shown images of male faces that were identical expect for eye color. In this test, both blue and brown eyes were considered equally trustworthy, the study authors noted in a journal news release.

"We concluded that although the brown-eyed faces were perceived as more trustworthy than the blue-eyed ones, it was not brown eye color per se that caused the stronger perception of trustworthiness but rather the facial features associated with brown eyes," Karel Kleisner and colleagues from Charles University in the Czech Republic wrote in the report.

More information

The Tech Museum of Innovation at Stanford University offers a calculator to determine the color of your children's eyes.

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