Mental Health

Brown Eyes are Perceived as More Trustworthy than Blue Eyes

By Drishya Nair | Update Date: Jan 10, 2013 07:07 AM EST

Those beautiful blue eyes of yours may win many hearts, but won't win anybody's trust, because people usually do not perceive blue colored eyes as trustworthy when compared to brown eyes. At least that's what a new research says.

According to the new study, people view brown-eyed faces as more trustworthy, except if the blue eyes belong to a broad-faced man, Medical Xpress reports.

The study by Karel Kleisner and colleagues from Charles University in the Czech Republic was aimed at understanding "What makes us think a person's face looks trustworthy?"

For the study, researchers asked the participants to rate male and female faces for trustworthiness based on their eye color and face shape.

The findings revealed that a large number of participants rated brown-eyed faces more trustworthy than blue-eyed, irrespective of the gender of the person the eyes belonged to.

Also, males with more rounded faces, bigger mouths and larger chins were perceived to be more trustworthy than those with narrow ones. However, the shape of the face did not seem to matter when it came to trustworthiness of females.

In order to decide on which feature mattered the most while judging the trustworthiness of a person, the researchers tried a third test, wherein they presented the participants with photographs of male faces which were exactly the same, except for the difference of eye color.

In their third experiment, the researchers found that the participants perceived both eye colors as equally trustworthy.

"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," the study said.

The study was published Jan. 9 in the open access journal PLOS ONE.

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