Children are more likely to trust an adult who has an attractive face, new research has found.

According to a US researcher, when learning about the world around them, ‘children rely heavily on information provided to them by other people'.

"Previous studies have shown children can be influenced by a range of factors such as whether the adult was correct in the past or if they are familiar to them. Our study wanted to examine whether children would trust an attractive stranger over an unattractive stranger," explained Igor Bascandziev of Harvard University.

Forty college students were shown 56 images of women. They ranked them according to how attractive the women in the pictures were. Only images that were rated the lowest (the most unattractive) and the highest (the most attractive) were selected to be shown to a group of 32 children aged four and five.

Twelve images of white women aged between 18 and 29 were eventually chosen from the 56 to be shown to the children.

Each child was shown images of six objects and asked to name them. Irrespective of whether the child guessed the objects correctly, the researcher said that they should ask one of two people if they were correct.

The children were then shown two photos - one deemed attractive and one deemed unattractive. They were asked which person they thought would know the right answer. After picking a picture, the child was then shown what that person thought the object was. The child was then asked who they thought was correct.

The research found that more children overall, but particularly girls, were more likely to select the attractive face. Both boys and girls were also more likely to believe the answer coming from the attractive person.

"We see from the results that children and especially girls have more trust in attractive faces, even though there are no obvious reasons why people with more attractive faces would be more knowledgeable about object labels.

"The gender difference could relate to boys not paying as much attention to the initial presentation of the faces or other research has pointed to the fact that females have superior face perception," Mr Bascandziev explained.

He added that it would be interesting in the future to explore the issue of whether children ‘would continue favouring the more attractive face even when they have evidence that the more attractive face is unreliable and the less attractive informant is a reliable informant'.

Details of these findings are published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology.