CHILDREN FIND PRETTY PEOPLE MORE TRUSTWORTHY

(June, 2016) A new study finds that children think the uglier you are, the less trustworthy you are. In a study recently published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers have found that as children, how we perceive someone’s trustworthiness is linked to how attractive we find them. Researchers at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, and Wenzhou Medical University, China, assessed 138 participants – groups of children aged eight, ten and 12 years old, and compared them to a group of adults. They used a face generation program (FaceGen) to produce 200 images of male faces – all with a neutral expression and direct gaze. In the first of two sessions, each participant was shown each face, and asked to rate how trustworthy they thought that person was. A second session followed a month later where participants repeated the exercise, this time rating the attractiveness of the same faces. They found that faces deemed more trustworthy were also considered to be more attractive. This relationship also strengthened with age, and reveals that, like adults, children also look to a person’s attractiveness as an indication of their character.
(full study here: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00499/full)
* And you can believe me, this is true.
* More bad news for clowns.
* Luckily, pretty people don’t take advantage, ’cause the world gives them everything anyway.
* This doesn’t explain the popularity of Deadpool.
* Maybe this is why women trust the handsome bad-boy types.
* I’m just trying to play along here.
* I’m also surprised they would do a politically incorrect study like this.
* Why not call it, “More Bad Things About Being Ugly”?
* You can trust pretty people more – trust them to be full of themselves.