Have you ever looked across the room and thought, "Bro looks dumb as a stick."
If somehow you didn't feel awful for judging a someone by looks alone...
Well, science is on your side too.
Hey dummies, Trace here for DNews -- Judging a book by its cover is an age-old adage, and
it wouldn't still exist unless people KEPT JUDGING BOOKS!
Looking at people's faces is easy, and we want to wheedle as much information out of
looks as we can, because social interaction is hard, guys!
You have to like, listen, and talk and listen and in the right order...
Uhhhhhgggh can't I just look at you and know if you can do my math homework, please?
New research in Plos One has jumped on this bandwagon too.
Researchers in the Czech Republic gave IQ tests to 80 men and women and took a static
picture of their face.
Then, 160 volunteers looked at the faces and guessed how they'd done on their IQ test.
Humans LOVE research like this.
There have been studies showing how faces reveal people's race, sex, political affiliation,
ethnicity, health, social statues, attractiveness and intelligence.
I'll stop the suspense.
YES, this research confirms people will judge a book by it's cover.
And a face.
By it's cover.
Or whatever.
Basically, the faces who volunteers believed to be intelligent actually did score highly
on the IQ test.
However, the guesses were only accurate for MEN.
It didn't work for WOMEN.
We all know IQ tests are a notoriously bad measure of REAL WORLD intelligence, but at
least everyone was given the same IQ test.
The volunteers DID correctly guess how people did on that specific test, just by a picture
-- and did so with statistical significance.
Oddly, though, when the researchers used a computer to compare facial shape with IQ,
they couldn't find anything, but if compared to PERCEIVED intelligence they found intelligent
faces are prolonged, with a broader distance between the eyes, a larger nose, a slight
upturn to the corners of the mouth, and a sharper, pointing, less rounded chin.
The researchers guess it has something to do with our sexual evolution.
They think there must be some reason, men benefitted from wearing their intelligence
factor on their faces, whereas women needn't advertise their wily ways.
Furthermore, since they already had faces and volunteers, they also asked them to measure
attractiveness and sorry to say -- smarter people are not more attractive nor are they
uglier.
What do you think?
Are you going to save this image to your phone and check who your smart and dumb friends
are?
Tell us your thoughts on this experiment down below, and be sure you subscribe so you won't
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You're all the best, thanks for watching.