Research published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior examined the effect of women’s shoes on men’s behaviour and established that women wearing high heels move a man to be more helpful than when they don flats.
“Women’s shoe heel size exerts a powerful effect on men’s behavior,” says study author Nicholas Guéguen of the Université de Bretagne-Sud in France, highlighting how his study reveals men’s age-old weakness for attractive physical attributes.
The study consisted of four experiments. In the first experiment – which involved 90 men – Guéguen had a 19-year-old woman wear either flat shoes or high heels and attempt to get pedestrians to stop and answer a survey on gender equality. While wearing flats, 40 per cent of men responded but that figure doubled to 80 per cent when she was in high heels.
In a second experiment – involving 180 women and 180 men – four women wearing either flat shoes or high heels asked participants to complete a survey on local food habit consumption. Data showed that men were more obliging to the women in heels.
In a third experiment, Guéguen tested people’s spontaneous urges to be helpful when a woman – wearing different heel sizes – dropped her glove in the street. Results indicated that men’s helpfulness increased along with the height of the heels the woman was wearing. However, heel height had no influence on other women’s willingness to help.
Just in case you didn’t think this was some serious science, here are some of the results: “The difference between the medium heels condition and the high heels condition approached significance, χ 2(1, N = 60) = 3.07, p = .08, ф = .22.”
In other words, “Our results showed, that, in general, spontaneous help was offered more easily to women as soon as the length of their shoe heels increased,” Guéguen wrote.
In the final experiment Guéguen took his research to a bar and found that men were quicker to approach and start chatting with a woman depending on her footwear – 14 minutes when she was wearing flats and only 7 minutes if wearing heels.
“Women’s shoe heel size exerts a powerful effect on men’s behaviour,” said the study’s author in a summary.
“The results of these studies once again reveal how men focus on women’s physical attributes when judging and interacting with members of the opposite sex.”
Guéguen speculated that because models are so often depicted wearing high heels men have “started to associate the wearers of high-heeled shoes with those having sexual intent.”
So, is this a new reason to pop out and purchase a new pair of shoes?
