Question This is probably a foolish question but I'm bored and I think you get paid for this, a short answer would not offend me nor would none at all. Can you make any kind of judgment about a person by the look in their eyes, I'm not sure judgment is the right word. Iv seen people who I could tell had been through a lot and been right, coincidence maybe but I'm not sure maybe its hormones or something. Perhaps you've spent some time thinking about it if so please share if not please share anyway.PS you guys are amazing and I thank you for all the answered questions, I never thought I'd get an answer to one let alone all of them cept for one but I understand why it wasn't answered. I don't know what you get paid but its not enough

Accepted:
March 28, 2016

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As it turns out, we don't get

As it turns out, we don't get paid. One reason is that, as you may have noticed, there's no charge to ask a question and there's no tip jar. ;-)

On to the question. It's an empirical question; it depends on how our minds and bodies actually work. But it's pretty safe to say that the answer is yes: sometimes you can tell things about a person by the look in their eyes. It's far from perfect and not always reliable, but there's no completely reliable way to know what a person's state of mind is, so that's not a special problem for this case.

In fact, there's not much mystery here from the point of view of common sense. Most of us are at least tolerably good at reading facial expressions. And as for the eyes, they're part of the expression. A fake smile won't give you crow's feet; a genuine smile raises the cheeks and makes the corners of the eyes crinkle. We can learn to tell the difference. That's just one example.

Of course, it's not always so simple. A person's facial expression (eyes especially) may signal a particular emotion or state of mind. And that, maybe together with other cues, may suggest a back story. But the more elaborate the back story we find ourselves coming up with, the more ways for it to go wrong. We might think someone has "been through a lot" based on their expression. And we might be right. Or we might just have caught them at a moment when they're particularly but temporarily tired and out of sorts. So we need to be careful not to over-interpret.