According To Science, Here’s What You Can Do To ‘Look Intelligent.’ No, Glasses Aren’t The Answer

Have you felt that people, at times, don’t pay attention to you just because they think you don’t look smart enough? Have you also tried to put on a pair of big glasses just to give your face the smart-guy look?

Well, as it turns out, those glasses aren’t really helping you.

Some psychologists at the University of St. Andrews conducted a study and the results suggested that more than the glasses you’re wearing, it is your facial expressions that influence whether or not people perceive you as intelligent.

According to their research, if the expressions on your face suggest that you are happy and alert, people are more likely to consider you a smart person. The research, which included four experiments, also found out that people who are slightly happy, are perceived as intelligent by others.

To conduct this study, the psychologists showed 500 participants images of 100 Caucasian adults between the ages of 18 and 33 and 90 kids between 5 and 17 and asked them how smart the subjects in the pictures looked. The study concluded that both children and adults looked more intelligent if they had a subtle smile on their faces and had their eyes wide open.

Although what is going on inside your brain has little to do with the way your face looks, humans do have a tendency to relate these to each other. So, if you’re someone who appears tired and depressed most of the time, you shouldn’t be surprised if your friends don’t think you’re very smart.

Lead author of the study, Dr Sean Talamus, told the Independent,

Attractive people are often perceived as more intelligent, but we wanted to investigate how individuals can change their perceived intelligence, regardless of their attractiveness. The solution seems to lie in subtle differences in a resting facial expression that are related to sleep – namely eyelid droopiness and subtle frowning.