Can you judge someone’s personality from a dick pic?

A new study has asked women to try and judge men’s personalities based in their dick pics, in what we can assume is the closest the science community has ever come to replicating Naked Attraction in a clinical setting.

Published on 4 August in the journal Sexuality & Culture, a paper from researchers Thomas Brooks at New Mexico Highlands University and Stephen Reysen at Texas A&M University sought to uncover what impressions women may develop of men they’ve never met or seen before based solely on their nudes.

The researchers asked 106 female participants to give feedback on the 24 separate dick pics sourced from Reddit forums (definitely one of the sketchier elements of this study). Off the basis of the nudes they were asked to draw conclusions on the men’s presumed sexual performance (whether they were a “Pillow Princess” or “Pleaser”), number of sexual partners and frequency of sex. They were also required to judge whether the penis in question was average or “prototypical” (the ideal) and to try and gauge how attractive the man was in real life, as well as make calls on his personality: how he would rate for extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. So far, so weird!

The hypotheses set by Brooks and Reysen were that the respondents (mostly heterosexual) would judge the longer, more girthy penises as preferable to short thin ones and that having a good dick would lead to a more favourable perception of the man’s personality and attractiveness. They also thought that trimmed pubes would reflect positively on the man as well.

And, as you can imagine, these hypotheses did in fact ring true! The shorter and narrower penises were “perceived [to] be more neurotic,” while long penises were judged to be more “extraverted”, “conscientious” and “open to new experiences”. When it came to pubic hair, trimmed pubes came out on top as the more prototypical and attractive option.

Yikes! As it turns out, people really do have some strong opinions about dick pics. Let’s just remember that one size does not fit all, and pour one out for the conscientious kings with unkempt penises of gold…