Life can be tough for kids with protruding ears, who can suffer low self-esteem because of their appearance, but a new study finds that while children with protruding ears naturally attract attention, there is no social stigma attached to the feature.
In the study, the personalities of children with protruding ears were rated no differently from those of children without protruding ears. In fact, the children with the most protruding ears even tended to be rated as the smartest and most likeable.
The findings suggest that “protruding ears are eye-catching, but they don’t necessarily fire up the imagination in a negative way,” said Dr Ralph Richel, lead author of the study.
For some of the children in the study, “protruding ears may make them look cuter,” said Ritschl, an ear, nose and throat specialist and facial plastic surgeon at the Cantonal Hospital of St. Gallen in Switzerland.
For the study, researchers took photos of 20 children between the ages of 5 and 19 who were considering having otoplasty — a surgical procedure to reduce ear prominence. They also created Photoshopped versions of each photo in which parts of the children’s ears were altered to show what the children would look like after the surgery. Using eye-tracking devices, the researchers measured exactly how long observers looked at different parts of the children’s faces, and then asked observers to guess the children’s personalities based on the photos.
The results showed that observers looked at each face for around seven seconds and spent around 10% of the time looking at the ears in the image with the protruding ears, compared with just 6% of the time in the Photoshopped image.
Researchers expected to find out why people stare longer at ear protrusions because people are universally attracted to facial features that are novel or that look different from most other faces, they said in a study published Thursday (March 19) in the journal JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery.
Ritzel said it’s thought people focus on facial features because they help them recognize others, and in the study, researchers estimated that about 5 percent of people have protruding ears.
Life can be hard for kids with protruding ears, and they may suffer low self-esteem due to their appearance. But a new study shows that when a child’s ears stick out more than normal, people’s eyes are naturally drawn to them, and the feature carries no social stigma. Photo: Getty Images
But the researchers were surprised that observers did not have negative perceptions of personality traits in children with protruding ears, Richel said. This finding indicates that having protruding ears may not carry a social stigma, as some researchers previously thought. In general, attractiveness is known to strongly influence perceptions of a person’s personality, the researchers said. In other words, if someone is rated as smart or very likeable, they will also be seen as attractive.
The children in the study “seemed cute and smart in their own way,” Richel said.
It’s unclear why people have believed that having protruding ears leads to prejudice against people, Richel told Live Science. Its roots may lie in an idea put forward in 1876 by Italian criminologist and physician Cesare Lombroso, who believed that what was then thought to be a birth defect, such as protruding ears, could identify criminals. Lombroso’s idea became popular, Richel said.
“To this day, popular cartoons with prominent ears, like Shrek, represent characters who are unintelligent, immature and eccentric,” he said.
People from different cultures may have different ideas about atypical facial features, Richel noted. For example, in Asian countries, protruding ears or especially large ears are considered desirable and a sign of good luck, he added.
But prejudice or not, the world can be a harsh place for kids with protruding ears, who pay more attention than adults to small differences between their own appearance and that of others, the researchers said in the study.
Bullying is one of the main reasons parents push their children for corrective surgery, Richel said. While otoplasty is not a minor procedure, it generally causes little discomfort and carries a very low risk of serious complications, she said.