All That Glisters
Don't judge a book by its cover.
Appearances can be deceiving.
Think not I am what I appear.
Most of us have heard these sayings in one form or another. The gist of it is simple enough to grasp in principle, but it's surprisingly not as easy to apply in practice. This is because our minds are primed to immediately form a correlation between the way certain objects or people look and their assumed value. When this is generalised enough to involve whole groups of people, it becomes a form of stereotyping. Whether this association stems from our biology or our upbringing, it certainly does have a noticeable impact on the way we lead our lives as well as the choices that we make.
In the paper How we judge personality from faces depends on our beliefs about how personality works, Jonathan Freeman and others note how people form personality impressions from others' facial appearance within only a few hundred milliseconds. The experiment concluded that the more people are likely to believe that attributes such as friendliness and competence may occur within the same individual, the more their gauged facial features resemble. We certainly do tend to judge people's personality based on their physical appearance, but our beliefs on personality themselves too have a substantial role to play. These in turn form our initial impressions of everything that we perceive and therefore also the decisions that we make regarding them.
Now, there is probably a side of you that squirms a bit on the inside and feels self-conscious, but while we must recognise that not all of these impressions are trustworthy and smart to follow up with, they did also evolve for the purpose of keeping us safe whenever we come into contact with strangers. Sometimes, it's just not worth the risk and we should probably pay heed to our instincts and just not to talk to that sketchy dude with a full blown beard and red eyes or disturb that sharp-looking woman who doesn't seem to do much emoting.
But as far as the people who we communicate with on a daily basis go, we should perhaps bear in mind that while our minds may have proudly chalked up the attitudes and personalities of certain people as bright or dull, friendly or cold, frivolous or serious, or rational or emotional, these judgements were probably based on a single or couple experiences at most. We still find ourselves surprised and somewhat confused when we observe attractive people or those belonging to our ingroup being nasty or those whom we consider "plain" or members of our outgroup being kind. Prejudice is ugly that way. This isn't something that most of us would be able to suppress thinking in the first place, but maybe we should stay open-minded and choose to be blind so that we may truly see a person for who they are.
New York University. (2018, August 27). How we judge personality from faces depends on our beliefs about how personality works. Science Daily.
Appearances can be deceiving.
Think not I am what I appear.
In the paper How we judge personality from faces depends on our beliefs about how personality works, Jonathan Freeman and others note how people form personality impressions from others' facial appearance within only a few hundred milliseconds. The experiment concluded that the more people are likely to believe that attributes such as friendliness and competence may occur within the same individual, the more their gauged facial features resemble. We certainly do tend to judge people's personality based on their physical appearance, but our beliefs on personality themselves too have a substantial role to play. These in turn form our initial impressions of everything that we perceive and therefore also the decisions that we make regarding them.
Now, there is probably a side of you that squirms a bit on the inside and feels self-conscious, but while we must recognise that not all of these impressions are trustworthy and smart to follow up with, they did also evolve for the purpose of keeping us safe whenever we come into contact with strangers. Sometimes, it's just not worth the risk and we should probably pay heed to our instincts and just not to talk to that sketchy dude with a full blown beard and red eyes or disturb that sharp-looking woman who doesn't seem to do much emoting.
But as far as the people who we communicate with on a daily basis go, we should perhaps bear in mind that while our minds may have proudly chalked up the attitudes and personalities of certain people as bright or dull, friendly or cold, frivolous or serious, or rational or emotional, these judgements were probably based on a single or couple experiences at most. We still find ourselves surprised and somewhat confused when we observe attractive people or those belonging to our ingroup being nasty or those whom we consider "plain" or members of our outgroup being kind. Prejudice is ugly that way. This isn't something that most of us would be able to suppress thinking in the first place, but maybe we should stay open-minded and choose to be blind so that we may truly see a person for who they are.
New York University. (2018, August 27). How we judge personality from faces depends on our beliefs about how personality works. Science Daily.
Comments
Post a Comment