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| A man's brown eye. CREDIT: Best Photo Studio and Shutterstock |
Good
news for all the brown-eyed guys out there: Men with chocolate-colored irises
are judged as more trustworthy than blue-eyed dudes. But the results are
somewhat complicated by the fact that it's not eye color itself that's judged
as trustworthy, but baby-faced features that seem linked to having brown eyes.
The findings also come from a study of Czech participants, so the judgments
could vary across cultures. "Eye color is something superficial, and
nobody would expect there is a deeper association with the structure of the
bones," said study researcher Karel Kleisner of Charles University in
Prague. "We were a little bit surprised," Kleisner told LiveScience.
Windows to the soul?
Kleisner
became interested in what social signals eye color might convey, because blue
eyes are relatively new on an evolutionary timescale. Before about 6,000 to
10,000 years ago, humans didn't have blue eyes, scientists have found. So why might the mutation that caused blue
eyes have spread so far, Kleisner wondered? There could be an evolutionary
reason for the variability in eye color, he said, but it doesn't seem to have
to do with how well different colored eyes work. Perhaps instead, Kleisner
said, eyes convey something about their owners. "Eyes are not only for
seeing, but also to be seen," he said.
To
test the hypothesis, Kleisner and his colleagues photographed 40 male and 40
female students from the Czech Republic, all with either blue or brown eyes.
They then asked another group of Czech students (142 female and 98 male) to
rate the photographs for trustworthiness, attractiveness or dominance on a
scale of one to 10. The results revealed that brown-eyed faces were seen as
more trustworthy than blue-eyed ones, particularly for male faces. Female faces
showed the same trend, but the results did not reach statistical significance,
leaving open the possibility that they were the result of chance.
he
catch, however, arose in a second study. This time, researchers took the same
faces and used a photo-editing program to swap the eye color of each person.
Now the brown-eyed guys and girls sported blue eyes and the blue-eyed folks had
brown eyes. Another 106 students judged those photos for trustworthiness.
The
same faces as in the first experiment were seen as the most trustworthy, even
though they now had blue eyes. That means that it's not the eye color itself,
but something about the face shape that engenders trust, Kleisner said. An
analysis of the faces revealed that the brown-eyed men had bigger mouths,
broader chins, bigger noses and more prominent eyebrows than the blue-eyed men.
In other words, their mugs looked more baby-faced and cheerful, perhaps a look
that makes people feel trusting, Kleisner said.
Evolution of eye color
Explaining
why this might be — and why eyes appear linked to face shape — is more
speculative. One possibility, Kleisner said, is that when blue eyes first
appeared on the scene 10,000 years or so ago, their novelty made them sexy. If
men were pursuing blue-eyed babes with more ardor than brown-eyed girls, they
may have cared less about other facial features, such as ones indicating
trustworthiness. This, in effect, would have made it easier for less
trustworthy-looking facial genes to get passed on in blue-eyed men and women.
Male
faces in the study were more variable in shape than the female faces, Kleisner
said, which could explain why the trustworthiness differences were noticeable
only in men. There simply may not have been enough variety in the women's faces
to tell for sure whether their shapes influenced trustworthiness.
Kleisner
expects that face shapes seen as trustworthy would likely be similar across
cultures, but eye color might be more susceptible to cultural stereotype, which
could influence similar experiments done outside of the Czech Republic. In
Turkish folklore, for example, he said, blue eyes are said to be more
susceptible to the Evil Eye, with the potential for cursing others. More work
across borders is needed to pin down the effects of eye color, he said.
Kleisner
and his colleagues report their work today (Jan. 9) in the journal PLOS ONE.
Source: Live Science
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