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Your Shoes May Say A Lot About You

We can tell you now: These are Mark's.
Mark Memmott
/
NPR
We can tell you now: These are Mark's.

Shoes can supposedly tell us more about a person than just whether they're sensible or stylish.

Eyder's choice of footwear today.
Mark Memmott / NPR
/
NPR
Eyder's choice of footwear today.

Or so researchers from the University of Kansas and Wellesley College say. In a paper published by the Journal of Research in Personality, they report that 208 college students shown photos of shoes were able to fairly accurately "rate the owners on their personality, attachment style, political bent and demographic measures, such as age, gender, and family income," MSNBC writes.

The researchers think the students could tell whether someone's worried about a relationship by their shoes if there were certain telltale signs. Freshly polished? Maybe you're anxious about losing your loved one to another. Scuffed up sneakers? It's more likely you're comfortable about your sole ... oops, soul mate.

This feels to us like a pretty small study and we wonder if there's more work to be done on this important subject.

Here's a test: which Two-Way blogger's feet are in the photo of two feet that graces this post?

Update at 3:55 p.m. ET. And The Pumas Belong To:

Mark.

Looks like most Two-Way readers assumed Eyder's the only sneaker-sporting dude on this blog. Well, think again.

We've added a shot of what he's got on today.

Update at 2:10 p.m. ET: We are, by the way, going to tell you who belongs to those sneakers. Watch for that important update later.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Mark Memmott is NPR's supervising senior editor for Standards & Practices. In that role, he's a resource for NPR's journalists – helping them raise the right questions as they do their work and uphold the organization's standards.
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