What Your Appearance Says About Your
Leadership Skills and 10 Other Traits
The surprising ways your
appearance affects other people's impressions of you.
Everybody judges.
Within a few seconds of seeing someone--whether on a date or at the grocery store--we decide on numerous
things about them, from how smart they are to how likely they are to commit a
crime.
Surprisingly,
our first impressions can be remarkably accurate in some instances. In others, they can be
wildly off base.
Here are a few of the things we determine
about people based on how they look.
If you're attractive, people assume you have other positive
traits as well.
Thanks to a
phenomenon that social psychologists call "the halo effect," we tend to assume that good-looking
people possess other positive qualities aside from their looks, such as
intelligence and commitment.
Daniel
Hamermesh, a University of Texas at Austin psychologist who studies beauty in
the workplace, found
that, among other things, this cognitive bias
means good-looking people tend to get paid more.
Similarly, in
a study
of male undergrads who were asked to evaluate
an essay written by an unnamed female peer, the participants judged
the writer and her work more favorably when
they were shown a photo of an attractive woman whom they believed to be the
writer, as opposed to when they were shown a photo of an unattractive woman or
no photo at all.
In a 2009 study, researchers showed participants the photos of 123 undergrads
from the University of Texas at Austin who were either told to have
a neutral expression or were allowed to pose how they wanted.
No matter which position the
people took, the viewers were better than chance at judging the following:
how extroverted they were, how high their self-esteem was, how religious they
were, how agreeable they were, and how conscientious they were.
People use facial clues about your height to judge your
leadership abilities.
In 2013, a group of psychologists, neuroscientists, and computer
scientists from Europe and the United States had a small group of participants
look at portraits of 47 white men and 83 white women and evaluate them
first on their height and next on their ability to lead.
The researchers found that people used factors in the photos like gender and face
length to make guesses about people's height and then used these
same factors when they judged their leadership qualities. Faces that
appeared to belong to taller people were rated as belonging to better leaders.
Your facial structure can give people clues about how aggressive
you are.
A small 2013
study by researchers at the Center for
Behavior Change at the University College London suggested that
men with higher testosterone levels were (not
surprisingly) more likely to have wider faces and larger
cheekbones. Men with these facial features also tended to have more
aggressive or status-driven personalities.
People also use your facial
structure to make judgments about how strong you are.
In a
2015 study, scientists showed people photos
of 10 different people with five different facial expressions and then asked
them to rate how friendly, trustworthy, or strong the photographed person
appeared.
Not surprisingly, viewers tended to
rank people with a happy expression as more friendly and trustworthy than those
with angry expressions. They also tended to rate people with broad faces as
stronger.
How people perceive your face could be a life-and-death matter.
For a 2015
study, a pair of University of Toronto
psychologists collected photos of real inmates who were, at the time,
incarcerated by the Florida Department of Corrections after having been
sentenced for first-degree murder. Roughly half were serving life sentences;
the other half were awaiting execution.
Then the researchers had a group of
participants look at the photos and rate the trustworthiness of the faces
pictured on a scale from 1 (not at all trustworthy) to 8 (very trustworthy).
Those who were rated as less trustworthy were more likely to be sentenced to death
than those who looked more trustworthy.
In the second
part of that study, participants looked at photos of people previously
convicted of murder but subsequently exonerated, usually on the basis of DNA
evidence. In a disturbing twist, people who were rated less trustworthy were
still more likely to have been sentenced to death, even though they were later
found not guilty. "Facial appearance affects real-world criminal
sentencing independently of actual guilt," the researchers wrote
in their paper.
Cognitive biases aside, how you look can sometimes indicate
things about your health. Wrinkles, for example, can suggest heart problems.
Pruney skin can reveal more than
just age -- it may also tell us something about how our hearts are doing. A 2012 study compared the number of wrinkles on the faces and upper inner arms of
a group of 261 people with long-lived parents and a random group of 253 people
the same age. Women with the lowest risk of heart disease were described as
looking more than two years younger than their age compared
with those with the highest risk of heart disease.
Other underlying health issues may be seen first in the eyes.
Doctors can
diagnose numerous conditions just from
looking at your eyes. Red spots in the retina, the
light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye, can be a sign of diabetes.
When blood-sugar levels get too high, this can block the blood
vessels in the retina, causing them to swell and burst.
Your face might not tell the whole story. For men, finger length
has been tied with cancer risk.
Scientists studied the finger lengths of 1,500 patients with
prostate cancer and 3,000 healthy men over a period of 15 years by asking them
to look at pictures of hands and choose one that resembled their own.
Men who said
their index fingers were the same length or longer than their ring fingers were
one-third as likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer over the course
of the study as men whose index fingers were relatively shorter, and the effect
was even larger for men under the age of 60. Keep in mind that the study
was based on the men's reported finger length, not actual measurements, so
further studies are probably needed to confirm the findings.
And your height could reveal your risk of certain diseases.
Studies
suggest that taller people have a lower risk of heart disease, while shorter people may have lower rates of cancer. The effects are believed to do with the amount of growth hormone
produced, which can protect against some diseases but increase the risk of
others. The findings, however, do not necessarily mean that being tall or
short will prevent you from getting either disease.
BY ERIN BRODWIN
http://www.inc.com/business-insider/11-ways-physical-appearance-judged-about-your-skills-traits.html?cid=em01014week31a
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