Children between the ages of 8 to 12 put more trust in people who are good-looking or beautiful, than people who are ugly or unattractive. A new study suggests that children consider physical appearance as a big indicator of a person's trustworthiness.
The study, published in the Frontiers Psychology and conducted by researchers from the Wenzhou Medical University in China, observed how young children perceived beauty and measured how it correlated to trustworthiness. There were 138 participants divided into three groups of 8, 10 and 12-year-old kids.
Each child was shown at least 200 computer images of men and were asked to rate these faces based on how trustworthy they appear. The same group of kids were also asked to rate the faces for attractiveness the following month, per Science Daily. The researchers did the same survey among a group of adults as well.
Children's Facial Trustworthiness Judgments
Impact of Facial Attractiveness https://t.co/hwvgMO6Fln MT @FrontPsychol pic.twitter.com/z1SAIXvVj2— Prison_Health (@Prison_Health) June 3, 2016
The results showed that both children and adult groups chose attractive people to be more trustworthy than ugly people. The results also showed that children's ability to pick beautiful people over ugly people increases with age. This implied that children's preferences for beautiful people become more solidly validated as they are older. The results also revealed that between the male and female respondents, it is the latter that generally make better judgement calls than men when it comes to a person's trustworthiness.
The study wants to emphasize that people generally judge the book by its cover, as the saying goes, and do so early on in childhood. The researchers imply that this is an innate ability in people that becomes stronger with age.
However, the study poses some limitations because it only involved a few respondents. The methodology used to quantify beauty or attractiveness is also not broken down in a more specific manner. Thus, further studies are needed to prove its hypothesis. Lifehack suggests to take what you can about the results, but it shouldn't affect your own perception of your beauty.
