Kids stare. They are curious and learning, but are you the kind of person who gets stared at all the time by kids? There might be a reason behind it. Do you ever wonder why kids are immediately attached to some people, whereas others take one look at their faces and end up crying hysterically? When it comes to honesty and frankness about what they’re thinking, most kids don’t hold back when it comes to their thoughts.
You can ask a kid anything, and you know they’re gonna tell you the truth. Unfortunately, you might not always like what you hear, especially if kids tend to stare at you. Luckily, a psychological study may actually have the answer as to why they do this.
If kids and babies stare at you often, they may think you’re unattractive and untrustworthy.
In this study, published in Frontiers of Psychology, researchers in China “examined developmental changes in children’s abilities to make trustworthiness judgments based on faces and the relationship between a child’s perception of trustworthiness and facial attractiveness.” In other words, if kids find you attractive, they tend to like and trust you.
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To reach this conclusion, the researchers gathered 101 children aged 8 to 12 and 37 undergraduate students. They asked participants to rate the trustworthiness of 200 neutral male faces. Then, the participants judged these faces for their attractiveness.
For the young adults in the study, the agreement between trustworthiness and attractiveness increased with age. For children, however, the agreement was much more consistent. “These findings suggest that face-based trait judgment ability develops throughout childhood and that, like adults, children may use facial attractiveness as a heuristic cue that signals a stranger’s trustworthiness,” the study authors wrote.
On the other hand, the more attractive you are, the more trustworthy you appear to others.
The results from this study show that “people use facial cues to make judgments on a person’s character — and this ability to infer social traits is a crucial part of social functioning and development.” Children carry this information as they grow and use it to make decisions in adulthood.
Other research consistently supports the concept of attractiveness being linked to perceived trustworthiness. A study from Cornell University was conducted to test the “halo effect” in relationships, or “the assumption that physically attractive and successful people are ‘better’ than others.”
Vivian Zayas, an associate professor and researcher at Cornell, explained, “We see an attractive person as also socially competent, and assume their marriages are stable and their kids are better off. We go way beyond that initial judgment and make a number of other positive attributions.”
Humans are naturally drawn to good-looking people, even though it doesn’t sound totally fair.
Because of our bias towards attractive people, we often look past their flaws and give them the benefit of the doubt. We subconsciously determine that they are kinder, more honest, and more trustworthy than those we deem unattractive. Most of the time, we probably don’t even realize that we’re doing it.
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As adults, though, we know better than to judge a book by its cover, and we never truly know a person’s personality simply based on how attractive they are. So instead, we learn to get to know someone beyond their appearance. Unfortunately, we also sometimes find that although someone is attractive, they can also be real jerks who don’t deserve our attention.
Caithlin Pena is an editor and former contributor for YourTango. Her work has been featured on Thought Catalog, Huffington Post, Yahoo, Psych Central, and BRIDES.
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