A new study conducted by Karel Kleisner and colleagues from Charles University in the Czech Republic states that people tend to judge a man's trustworthiness by the structure of his face and eye color.
According to the study, people tend to trust brown-eyed men more than blue-eyed ones, unless the blue-eyed man has a broad face. The study was an initiative to gauge what people see in the face of a person to decide whether he or she is trustworthy.
The study was conducted on both male and female rats and two eminent features of the face were considered for the study - the face shape and eye color. A large number of participants found brown-eyed faces more trustworthy than blue-eyed faces for both male and female.
The study also found that men with broad faces, bigger mouths and larger chins were considered more trustworthy than men with slimmer face shapes. However, the shape of the face in women didn't matter when it came to gauging how trustworthy she is.
To decide which of the two features were more significant, a third test was conducted. Here, people were given two identical pictures of males except that they had different eye colors. It was found that both eye-colored men were considered equally trustworthy. Thus, leading scientists to conclude that the face shape of a person plays a more important role in people's perception of whether a person is trustworthy or not.
"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," reported authors of the study in a report published in Science Daily.
The findings were published Jan. 9 in the open access journal PLOS ONE.
