5 Personal Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Someone

How It Works

A study by a pair of colleges found some peculiar trends in our choice of shoes, but not what you might think. Subjects couldn't deduce, say, political affiliation by looking at shoes, but could deduce a shit-ton of extremely personal information, including your potentially insecure, clingy behavior in close relationships. Some examples, brought to you by science:

-Anxious, clingy people prefer new and well-maintained footwear to ease their bundle of nerves.

-People who wear practical shoes tend to be relatively agreeable.

-Calm, collected folks seem to get a kick out of wearing shoes that look uncomfortable (maybe to express the roaring ball of mayhem and agony they're constantly hiding within?).

-Aggressive people tend to wear ankle boots, which seems to have no inherent logic at all ... until you realize that they're clearly subconsciously selecting their footwear for better kicking-stuff-angrily ergonomics.

If you're reading this and thinking, "Well, my shoes don't say anything deep about my personality, I just picked them because they were comfortable and cheap!" keep in mind that it's a certain personality type who thinks that way. That's the point -- no matter what logic you think you're following in your own head when you step into your local mall's Shoes 'N' Shit store, you're still following logic that makes sense to your personality type. Making that purchase reveals that type to the world.

Sweet. That's a funny word in this context, now that we come to think of it. There's nothing about nice people that makes them sweet, unless you go out of your way to caramelize them. So what started this association between "sweet" and "nice"? Their everyday behavior, apparently -- it looks like munching on candy can turn a person into a regular good Samaritan.

How It Works

To be clear, we're not talking about how giving somebody a candy bar will put them in a better mood and thus make them more willing to do nice things (although one experiment did find that, it's also kind of obvious). No, they actually did five different studies (the abstract of which hilariously points out that nice people indeed rarely taste sweeter than others, thus gently alluding to another, far darker research project behind this one) and found that a general preference for candy means the person is also more likely to be agreeable and do good deeds, just because. They were just nicer people than the ones who, say, prefer potato chips instead of chocolate at snack time.

And it gets weirder: Test subjects already knew that this would be the result. The subjects they surveyed anticipated that the candy-loving subjects would be more selfless and agreeable than people who liked savory or salty snacks. The experiment was just confirming what people had already observed in their everyday lives, even though it makes no sense. So maybe the innate goodness that lies in the heart of mankind is actually diabetes.

So if you have a friend or family member with a newborn and you wonder how they're doing, you can either ask them or just see which hand they use to hold the baby. No, really.

How It Works

Dig up some of your baby pictures. Which arm did your mom use to cradle you? Hell, just imagine holding a baby right now -- which arm would you employ? Chances are you'd use the left one. The vast majority of people do, regardless of their dominant hand. It's just one of those weird little bodily hiccups nearly all humans share.

In fact, it's so widespread that when scientists realized that not everyone was doing this, they started digging in ... up until they actually identified it as a potential way to tell if the mother was suffering from depression. Stressed out and depressed mothers actually cradle their babies in their right arm a lot more often than healthy, happy moms. More than twice as often, in fact -- the ratio is 14 percent right-hand bias of the healthy mothers, compared to 32 percent of the depressed ones.

As for why, the scientists couldn't offer a guess. We're going to speculate that gestures made by stressed or annoyed people, such as the finger or that sarcastic "jerking off" motion, are more easily made with the left hand, so they instinctively need to keep it free. Prove us wrong, science.

How It Works

Those guys don't do what they do because they're mindlessly cruel; they do it because they're competitive.

To study this, researchers made male volunteers play a game in groups. Some of the groups were told that their scores would be compared to a rival school, while other groups were just playing for the hell of it. Surprisingly enough, men with classic bully faces were a lot more likely to risk their personal assets for the benefit of their group's overall results ... but only when they were told they were up against a rival school. They were willing to be altruistic as long as they thought it would help them win.

Other studies seem to support this. As long as there's a competitive situation of any kind going on, Jock Face Guy has a tendency to be more productive, driven, co-operative, and -- above all -- willing to sacrifice his own well-being for the benefit of the group he views as his own. This applies in even the highest walks of life, by the way -- from CEOs to presidential candidates, that stupid, rugged, wide jock face gives away these men's drive for achievement, and the time and dedication they pour into their close groups of friends and colleagues. All because of how much testosterone they were exposed to in the womb.

If it depresses you to think that so much of people's personal destinies are written before their birth, well, we have more bad news ...

Don't blame us, we've got the research to back it up: People with symmetrical faces generally have privileged childhoods, and therefore stand a greater chance of being wealthy themselves. Yes, even without going under the knife, the easiest road to beauty remains a well-endowed bank account.

But let's say they grew up underprivileged and end up with one of those plain, ordinary asymmetrical mugs. They have neither trust funds nor a perfect smile to rely on -- it's their guts and personality that matter now. What's more, just because they're not as pretty as those Symmetrical dicks, people expect them to do worse in life.

That, incidentally, is what makes them the most effective leaders there are.

Yep, the never-ending stream of tiny struggles that a symmetrically featured person will never face thanks to his angelic looks and padded wallet is custom made to turn a person's asymmetrical melon into a bona fide, super-effective leader, scientifically giving him an easy 20 percent edge as opposed to groups under Symmetrical leadership. Of course, having an asymmetrical face doesn't mean that somebody is automatically a Winston Churchill. It just means that they have the tools to become one. So the dude at the bar with the burns down one side of his face -- don't immediately put him in charge of your multinational corporation.

XJ and his asymmetrical face talk about writing on his blog, and you can follow him on Twitter and ask about that time at band camp.

For more help in understanding humans, check out 5 Douchebag Behaviors Explained by Science and 6 Misleading Assumptions You Make About Quiet People.

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out 4 People Who Blew Their One Moment in the Spotlight.

And stop by LinkSTORM to discover why you shouldn't wear that studded belt.

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