This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Snakes can elicit a wide range of human responses, including fear, disgust, awe and admiration. Past studies suggest that both humans and nonhuman primates, such as monkeys and apes, tend to quickly notice snakes in their surroundings.
Researchers at the University of Aveiro and the University of Brasilia recently carried out a study exploring the possible link between the physical characteristics of snakes and how people view them. Their findings, published in a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that similar-looking snakes elicit similar reactions of fear, disgust and positive impressions. "This paper grew out of a broader line of research in our lab on how humans and other primates perceive evolutionarily relevant threats, particularly snakes," Sandra C.
Soares, senior author of the paper, told Phys.org. "Much of this research has focused on their remarkably rapid detection, but we became increasingly interested in what happens after that initial detection. Fast visual detection of something as a snake is not necessarily the same as being afraid of it.
This led us to a simple question: what makes some snakes appear more threatening than others once we actually look at them?" In a review paper published in 2025, Soares and her colleagues examined past experimental evidence suggesting that different visual characteristics of snakes can become important at different stages of perception. Earlier work by Daniel Frynta, Eva Landová, Silvie Rádlová and colleagues had also suggested that people respond differently to different snake species, and the researchers wanted to further test this hypothesis. "From an ecological perspective, this makes sense: a slender colubrid, a broad-headed viper and a large constrictor may all be snakes, but they provide very different visual information," said Soares.
"Our study asked whether different snake morphologies and visual characteristics could help explain these differences in emotional and aesthetic responses, and how these responses interact with individual experience and ecological or cultural context." Rather than simply trying to determine if humans are particularly good at spotting snakes, Soares and her colleagues wanted to explore how people perceive snakes once they catch their attention. Specifically, they wanted to shed light on what characteristics make people perceive a snake as threatening, disgusting, beautiful or perhaps even fascinating, even if they are unsure how venomous or dangerous it is. To learn about these characteristics, the authors carried out an online study involving 377 participants from Brazil and Portugal, ages 18 to 74.
The participants viewed photographs of snakes on their devices and answered questions about them. The study used 92 photographs depicting different snake and snake-like species. The photographs were taken as part of the Reptiles of Ecuador project, a research initiative aimed at documenting reptiles in Ecuador.
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