According to researchers
What people assume about you based on your appearance alone
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Is seeing the same as believing? According to researchers: yes. A study found that visual information plays a major role in assessing competence and performance.
Whether in professional life, in private life or in politics – we humans quickly draw conclusions about the personality traits of others just by looking at them. Especially when we don’t know someone, certain characteristics emerge that we think we recognize and quickly pigeonhole.
Visual cues at work
In an article entitled “Blinded by Our Sight,” researchers Nuria Tolsá-Caballero and Chia-Jung Tsay discussed how quickly we draw conclusions about the personality traits of others based on our gaze.
One property that we can get an idea about most quickly is the following: competence. Especially when electing leaders or political elections, the competence of others is judged based on visual information. This also explains why employers still prefer applications with a photo. They can then use these to roughly recognize facial features, demographic characteristics and clothing and subconsciously form an idea of the applicant’s competence. According to the study, such impressions form within around 100 milliseconds of viewing. Additionally, perceptions of competence over appearance are said to have an enormous influence on who is selected for positions of status and power and even on how CEO salaries are determined.
The influence of appearance in politics
According to the two researchers, visual assessments can also influence voting decisions. The appearance of competence can have more influence due to the lack of other meaningful information, because we primarily use first impressions to judge people we don’t know. The researchers found that voters with less political knowledge appear to be influenced by visual cues in candidate photos in general elections, while voters with more political knowledge tend to be uninfluenced by visual cues. In primaries, however, they found that high-knowledge voters may know little about the candidates themselves and are therefore guided by visual cues. They even found that visual cues can influence impression formation so strongly that voters disregard or ignore relevant information.
How reliable are visual cues?
As the two researchers found out, actual competence is not related to facial features or clothing. Appearance also says nothing about effectiveness as a manager or performance as a CEO. Research on static visual cues shows that competence judgments are embedded in stereotypes about demographic characteristics and perceptions of status. This explains why we make judgments so quickly, even before we have had a serious conversation with a stranger or observed their behavior: Because we allow ourselves to be guided by stereotypes that are deeply rooted in us.
But what can we do about it? Probably the best way is us to free ourselves from our prejudicesby getting to know the people we intend to judge as a whole – that is, first and foremost personally – and in doing so freeing ourselves from our overzealous, objective perception.
Source used: sciencedirect.com