Outwardly attractive men and women seem to us smarter, more charming and more successful, even if in fact they have nothing to boast of except beauty. Such preferences are already noticeable in one-year-old children and only increase with age.
We are often told: “do not judge by appearance”, “do not be born beautiful”, “do not drink water from your face”. But studies show that we begin to assess whether a person can be trusted as early as 0,05 seconds after we see his face. At the same time, most people consider approximately the same faces to be trustworthy — beautiful. Even when it comes to people of a different race, opinions about their physical attractiveness are surprisingly similar.
To test how children react to strangers based on their attractiveness, psychologists from the Science and Technology University of Hangzhou (China) conducted an experiment in which 138 children aged 8, 10 and 12 years old, as well as (for comparison) 37 students1.
Using a computer program, the scientists created images of 200 male faces (neutral expression, gaze directed straight ahead) and asked study participants to rate whether these faces were credible. A month later, when the subjects had managed to forget the faces that were shown to them, they were again invited to the laboratory, shown the same images, and asked to rate the physical attractiveness of these same people.
Even eight-year-olds found the same faces beautiful and trustworthy.
It turned out that children, even at the age of 8, considered the same faces to be beautiful and trustworthy. However, at this age, judgments about beauty could vary quite a lot. The older the children were, the more often their opinions about who is beautiful and who is not, coincided with the opinions of other peers and adults. The researchers believe that the discrepancy in the assessments of younger children is associated with the immaturity of their brains — especially the so-called amygdala, which helps process emotional information.
However, when it came to attractiveness, children’s ratings were more similar to those of adults. Apparently, we learn to understand who is beautiful and who is not, already from an early age.
In addition, children often decide which person is worthy of trust, also according to their own, special criteria (for example, by external resemblance to their own face or the face of a close relative).
1 F. Ma et al. «Children’s Facial Trustworthiness Judgments: Agreement and Relationship with Facial Attractiveness», Frontiers in Psychology, April 2016.