Name: Can Looks Predict Someone's Intelligence?
Uploaded: 2014-04-29T10:01:00.000Z
Duration: 2 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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

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

What do you think? Are you going to save this image to your phone and check who your smart

Tell us your thoughts on this experiment down below, and be sure you subscribe so you won't

miss all the DNews! Every day! You're all the best, thanks for watching.