Introduction The question that I’m asking you guys today is how does

someone’s appearance affect the way we perceive them?

When we first look at someone, we usually judge them based on

their looks and facial expression, and normally the more attractive a
person appears to be, the more good characteristics our judgments
have towards them, whether it be consciously or not. For example
when we see people with joyful expressions, we link them with
characteristics like high loyalties and leadership. When they make
furious looks, we see features associated with poor commitment
and strong dominance. Sadness and fearful facial expressions
create perceptions of qualities linked with bad partnership and poor
dominance.

These small judgments affect the way we interact with a lot of

people. Sometimes we even alter our looks to give other people
good judgement of one self, Like when we dress up professionally
for a job interview or want to look nice/ friendly/ pleasant on a date
with someone.

The Halo Effect The halo effect is a phenomenon that leads individuals to make
biased decisions. The influence may be used in both good and bad
ways. It enables us to make rapid judgments since we only need to
evaluate one feature of an individual or idea to "understand" about
all that person's characteristics
It is linked with the stereotype with “What is beautiful is also good”.

An example of how this works is, let’s say that a woman is sitting in
an ice cream shop, the first guy that walks in is dressed nicely, is
pretty handsome, good looking, he’s tall, wears glasses, most of the
time her first impression of him would be that they are funny, smart,
nice, and have a strong work commitment

The second guy that walks in is wearing training clothes, and looks
a bit messier, most of the time, the woman would think they are a
fit, healthy, joyful person

Then the third guy walks in wearing sweatpants and a hoodie,

clearly tired, hair a mess, the woman’s first impression might be
that he is careless and disorganized.

Statistics and I will present to you an experiment conducted by Richard E. Nisbett

experiments and Timothy DeCamp Wilson in the University of Michigan
In this experiment, The participants were presented with one of two
interviews with the same teacher, a fluent French-speaking Belgian
 that spoke English with a noticeable dialect. Throughout one
interview, the professor portrayed himself as a pleasant teacher
who was appreciative of his students' brains and motivations. In the
other interview, he came off as dislikable, hostile and skeptical of
his pupils, and strict and conservative in his teaching approach. The
participants judged the teacher's likability, and the attractiveness of
his physical look, behavior, and dialect, after seeing the filmed
interview.

These are the results

As you can see in the graph, the more pleasant teacher had a more
appealing rating in physical appearance, mannerism, and accent,
while the cold teacher had more irritated judgements towards the
same things

Another example of where looks had affected the way we see

people, is when college students where looking for housemates,
they are given short descriptions on the people they are
considering, so a lot of them judge the people they have to choose
based on their looks and how friendly they seem, and a lot of the
time, the more friendly and attractive people are chosen.

Survey responses I also conducted a small experiment of my own to test out how true
this is nowadays. What I did was I sent out a survey rating
 someone's looks and judging, based only on their appearance, how
friendly, intelligent, likeable, and intimidating the person in the
picture seems. 5 was the highest rating a person could get and the
higher the rating the better judgement this person had based on
their looks. I picked out pictures using as what society today
considers “attractive” and “unattractive” and these are the results
that I got

The socially attractive people had very high ratings in all the
categories while the unattractive people didn’t, proving that the
more good looking a person is, the better they are perceived by
others.

Conclusion In today's society, people’s appearances and attractiveness,

determines how others will look at tham and sadly, the more
attractive you look the better you are perceived. Although, this
doesn't only apply to looks, many companies use this judgement to
their advantage in their advertising and for example, when creating
a website they take that really into consideration since people are
more inclined to assess a website favorably if they enjoy one
component of it.

As a matter of fact, I even took that into consideration as I made

this presentation, why else would I pick such an aesthetically
pleasing slide template?
Citations
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Verywell Mind, 19 July 2020, www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-halo-effect-2795906.

Devitt, James. “How We Judge Personality from Faces Depends on Our Pre-Existing Beliefs
About How Personality Works.” NYU, 27 Aug. 2018,
www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2018/august/how-we-judge-personality-from-faces
-depends-on-our-pre-existing-.html.

Fagan, Abigail. “How We Are Judged by Our Appearance.” Psychology Today, Sussex
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www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/subliminal/201206/how-we-are-judged-our-appearance.

Nielsen, Jakob, and Jen Cardello . “Halo Effect: Definition and Impact on Web User
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Nisbett, Richard E., and Timothy D. Wilson. "The halo effect: evidence for unconscious
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Padron, Anna. “Attractiveness Bias: Do Looks Affect Perception?” Achona, 17 Feb. 2017,
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