Do women in heels have more of an effect on men than women not in heels?  According to a new French Study, the answer would be a resounding “Yes”.

“Women’s shoe heel size exerts a powerful effect on men’s behavior,” said Dr. Nicolas Guéguen, a psychologist at the Université de Bretagne-Sud in Rennes, and the scientist behind the study.

For the four-part study, Guéguen asked four females to wear flats, two, or four-inch heels and make note of their interactions with unfamiliar men.

In the first experiment, a female stood on the street and asked passersby to complete a survey. When the women were wearing flats, 25 out of 60 men (42 percent) agreed to pause and take the survey. When the women wore two-inch heels, 36 of 60 men (60 percent) agreed to take the survey. And that number spiked to 49 out of 60 men (82 percent) when the women wore four inch heels.

Female passersby stopped to complete the survey around a third of the time, no matter how high the women’s heels were.

In another experiment, testing empathy, the women wore similar clothing of the same color, and they each dropped a glove wearing three different pairs of shoes in the same height categories as in the above experiment and noted whether men retrieved it for them.

Again, the same pattern emerged–with men playing the gentleman about 62 percent of the time when the ladies wore flats, and 93 percent of time when they wore high heels.

Females didn’t respond differently according to the heel height of the women who dropped a glove.

As for why high heels have this power over men, Guéguen offered a simple explanation: heels simply make women more attractive to men. And he proved this hypothesis in a follow-up study, as yet unpublished, in which men shown the body profiles of women in flats or heels tended to think the heel-wearing women were more attractive.

“High heels were associated with greater sexiness, overall physical attractiveness, breast attractiveness, beauty, attractiveness to other men, and willingness for a date.”

The study was published in Springer’s journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.