Did you know that first impressions of faces can actually shape how we perceive an individual’s mental state? New research has proved this notion.
Published in Nature Human Behavior, one study found that first impressions of faces might impact the inferences we make about other people’s mental states.
“Over the years there have been a lot of surprising findings showing how first impressions from faces can predict important outcomes, such as which candidates would win an election, which politicians would be convicted of corruption, and which offenders would be sentenced to death,” Chujun Lin, first author of the paper, told Medical Xpress.
“These findings show that the snap judgments people make about others based merely on their faces may bias consequential decision-making in the real world, ranging from who we vote for, who law enforcement investigate and how juries evaluate cases.”
In a non-legal setting, these inferences can impact everyday decisions as well.
Strangers Are Subconsciously Guessing Your Personality Based on Your Looks
Using data from participants all across the world, researchers “quantified to which degree changing the perceived traits of a face would change people’s expectations of how this individual may feel and think in different situations,” said Lin, per Medical Xpress.
In doing so, “We found that 47 of these 60 mental state inferences were shaped by how the individual looks.”
For example, Lin explained that if someone has more feminine features, people might naturally expect them to feel more jealousy in friendships.
“This means that in most circumstances when other people are trying to understand how you feel and think, their understanding will be biased by their first impressions of your personality (which is not necessarily your true personality but just others’ judgments).”
Snap judgments are there to inform and oftentimes even protect us. They’re not inherently bad or wrong, but they can certainly misguide us. This research further proves the power and implications of first impressions based on physical appearance.
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