Men 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 rate their trustworthiness based on two features: the eye colour and face structure. A large number of 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. The shape of the face did not affect how trustworthy women were judged to be, according to the study published online in the journal PLoS One. In another experiment, participants were shown images of male faces that were identical except for the eye colour. In this test, both blue and brown eyes were considered equally trustworthy.
“We concluded that although the brown-eyed faces were perceived as more trustworthy than the blue-eyed ones, it was not the brown eye colour 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.
