Nerdiness not linked to glasses, study says
Last Updated: Friday, March 28, 2008 | 4:30 PM ET
CBC News
Sporting a pair of glasses doesn't necessarily indicate a nerdy personality, an Australian study says.
The study, published in the March edition of Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, discounts the long-held view that people who are short-sighted, or myopic, are socially withdrawn and conscientious, traits often associated with nerds.
"The long-held view that myopic persons are introverted and conscientious may reflect intelligence-related stereotypes rather than real correlations," wrote the researchers from the University of Melbourne's Centre for Eye Research Australia.
The researchers studied 633 individual twins and 278 family members with myopia and rated them on five personality traits: extroversion, conscientiousness, openness, agreeableness and neuroticism.
"All those 278 people came from families with myopia so if we're going to find something that's a personality trait, then you think it would be in those families," lead author Paul Baird, an associate professor, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"[But] we couldn't find anything associated with introversion, conscientiousness or passiveness."
They concluded there was no link between wearing spectacles and having an introverted or conscientious personality.
However, the researchers did find a small, but "significant, association between short-sightedness and agreeable personalities, but only in the twin samples.
A link between myopia and openness, which the researchers correlated with intelligence, was more pronounced, the study said.
"In multivariate analysis with age, sex, education, and the five personality factors entered as predictors, openness was the only significant personality predictor of myopia in both samples," the researchers wrote.
Associate Professor Nick Haslam of the university's psychology department, told the ABC that openness is one of the only personality traits that correlates with intelligence.
"People who score highly on this [trait] tend to have a wide range of interests, are often well-educated and widely read," he said.
So, while glasses wearers may not be as introverted and careful as stereotyped, the idea of a nerd sporting glasses and carrying a book may have some basis in reality.
With files from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
