Study: Kids think eyeglasses make other kids look smart

On average, two thirds of the participating children said they thought that kids wearing glasses looked smarter than kids not wearing glasses. And 57 percent of the participants said they thought kids with glasses appeared to be more honest. Both kids with and without glasses thought other kids wearing glasses looked smarter.

Walline said the findings suggest that media portrayals associating spectacles with intelligence may be reinforcing a stereotype that even young children accept.

In the case of the other four questions in the survey, the answers were not consistent enough to suggest that glasses made a difference in how the kids felt about the pictures they were examining.

Other trends emerged, however, that had nothing to do with whether the kids in the pictures were wearing glasses and which supported conventional wisdom about kids’ opinions. Both boys and girls said they thought that boys appeared to be better at playing sports. Boys indicated they would rather play with boys, and girls said they would prefer playing with girls. Both boys and girls thought the opposite gender looked more shy. Girls also were more likely than boys to pick their own gender when asked which child looked more honest.

The fact that the question of attractiveness yielded no significantly different answers for children with or without glasses suggests that kids don’t automatically consider kids with glasses to be unattractive, Walline said.

“The concern about attractiveness with glasses seems to be more internal to a particular child rather than an indicator of how they’ll feel about other people who wear glasses,” Walline said.

Walline conducted the study with Loraine Sinnott, Anita Ticak, Sylvia Jones and Lisa Jones of Ohio State’s College of Optometry, and Erica Johnson of the Southern California College of Optometry.

Contact: Jeffrey Walline, (614) 247-6840;
Written by Emily Caldwell, (614) 292-8310;