9 Weirdest Things Science Has Recently Discovered

5. Children Less Likely To Trust Ugly People

Sticking with our attractiveness theme, it's also likely that if a chicken thinks you're ugly, a child will think you're untrustworthy. Tough break, man.

The concept of the Halo Effect, a phenomenon that makes people more likely to assume that beautiful people or also more likely to be smart, sociable and morally good (sucks, but it's true), is well established. However, the effect it has in children is not as well studied as it's often thought to be a mechanism of sexual selection.

To find out whether our kids harbour the same prejudices we do, scientists in China set up an experiment with 138 eight, ten and twelve year olds, and a control group of adults, asking them to rate 200 computer generated faces for their trustworthiness and then, in a later experiment, for their attractiveness.

They found that both children and adults rated the attractive faces as more trustworthy and, what's more, they found that the older the children got, the stronger the link was, suggesting it only get's more ingrained.

So, if children flee you in the street, you might want to consider a bit of eyebrow grooming or something.