Eye Color

Book excerpt: Morgan Worthy, a research psychologist, presents a comprehensive picture of how eye color is related to the behavior of humans and animals. In humans, he used archival records of athletic performance to show the theoretical pattern which has light-eyed athletes performing at their best on self-paced tasks and dark-eyed athletes, on average, performing at their best on reactive tasks. This same general pattern is shown to hold true in animal behaviors such as hunting tactics of predators and escape tactics of prey. Whereas dark-eyed predators tend to rely on immediate, quick, reactions to catch prey, light-eyed predators tend to rely more on their ability to lie-in-wait or stalk prey. Various other behaviors such as perception and social interaction are discussed in the same theoretical framework.