Sunday Times 2
Protruding ears don’t trigger assumptions about personality
View(s):NEW YORK (Reuters) – - People with ears that stick out may feel self-conscious about how others perceive them. According to a new study, though, strangers do notice the ears but don’t make negative personality judgments based on them.
It was very surprising to find no such bias, according to senior author Dr. Abel-Jan Tasman of the Cantonal Hospital in St. Gallen, Switzerland.
“Looking closer, though, we realized that the ‘bad cases’ with the obviously most protruding ears, the longest visual dwell time on the ears and the largest difference in dwell times between uncorrected and corrected auricles all looked cute and smart in their own way,” he told Reuters Health by email.
U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at the SelectUSA 2013 Investment Summit in Washington in 20123 (Reuters)
Children develop a sharpened awareness of small differences between themselves and others, and bullying for different looks begins after the age of five or six, Tasman said. Parents’ fear that protruding ears lead others to make conscious or unconscious assumptions about personality is often behind decisions to alter a child’s ears surgically, Tasman and colleagues write in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery.
To see how much people really notice protruding ears and if seeing them triggers any biased assumptions about personality, the surgeons had 20 adult volunteers look at pictures of 20 children aged five to 19. All the children’s parents had requested corrective plastic surgery for protruding ears.
The researchers also digitally altered the same pictures to make the ears sit closer to the head, and showed the images to the volunteers.
The observers rated the kids in all the images on 10 personality traits by scoring them on a scale of one to 10 representing pairs of opposite extremes, such as friendly-unfriendly, creative-uninspired and honest-dishonest.
People did spend more time looking at ears that stick out compared to digitally altered ears. But they rated the kids equally assiduous, intelligent and likeable regardless of ear type. In fact, when people spent the most time focusing on protruding ears in the unaltered photographs, and those images scored higher on assiduousness, likeability and intelligence than the doctored images. Four of the five kids with the most protruding ears actually scored lower on the personality scale with corrected images.
“In these, the protruding ears may have added to their cuteness,” Tasman said.