It might have to do with the fact that glasses — like any garment or fashion accessory — hides physical features that are otherwise plainly visible. “Glasses cover not just the eyes themselves,” Neil Handley, the curator of the British Optical Association Museum at the College of Optometrists, told Pacific Standard. They also cover “the surrounding tissues, the cheekbones, the frown lines…These are all indicators of what you mean and are trying to say.”
In other words, glasses shroud some of the more naked facial features that reveal the nuanced signs of a person’s personality and affect. It’s a distraction that makes it harder to scrutinize someone. Our default reaction to that knowledge gap is to assume to best of others. And that might actually be reasonable.
A study00364-9/abstract) published last year and presented at the 2012 American Academy of Ophthalmology Annual Meeting suggested that myopia — a.k.a. nearsightedness — was associated with higher levels of education. The researchers, from the University Medical Center in Germany, studied 4,600 myopia-afflicted Germans between the ages of 35 and 74. About 53 percent of their sample size had graduated from college, compared with 24 percent that had no post-high school education.
The reasons why are unclear, but speculation harkens back to a previous stereotype: nearsighted people are probably able to take part in less outdoors activities, and therefore probably stay inside and tend to dig into books and learning materials. Of course, this is just one study, studying a people in one country, using educational degrees as a measure of intelligence. Frankly, it’s subpar science — and it would be a huge mistake to cite it as proof spectacled-people are smarter. After all, you don’t need a prescription to get glasses.
Not that that will make much of a difference. People will still have a knee-jerk reaction to think of people with glasses as smarter, even if it’s totally irrational to think so. Let’s just enjoy the popularity of four-eye’d geekiness while it lasts.