Staredit Network

Do you think a person's looks tell enough about his or her inner world that you can rate a person by his or her looks?

I think the short answer is no.

People have a tendency to extrapolate too much when, for example, they judge someone by how they look and turn out, by chance, to be correct. This might lead to an irrational belief that they can tell what someone is like by looking at them.

People are not one-dimensional.

The same rule applies to horoscopes and the like. If they're relevant to somebody once every 100 times then people will believe in them.

Yes and No. But mostly no.
If something serious like having a Nazi swastica tattoo. Except people can't compare it from a religious sign and a nazi sign.
Other than that, no.

I try not to rate or judge anyone by their looks. But i am deathly avoidant of mentaly retarded people, which brings me to why the hell am i missing school right now and on SEN?

-Ex

Depends what you mean by looks.

If you include body language in looks, you can learn a heck of a lot more about a person by what they do than by what they say. The majority of people are very aware of what they're saying. Very few of these people will be completly truthful, and speak their mind completly uncensored. You have to be incredibly intimate with someone for them to really open up to you, and chances are you will be able to count these people on one hand. However, most people are unaware of their body language, which is partly displayed unconciously. You can often read very deep emotions no one says aloud by their body language.

In short, you can tell more about what's going on in someone head (their "inner world" as you put it) by their body language than by what they say. It's why you really can't know someone over the internet.

If you don't include body language, you might as well be looking at a peice of dead meat. Dead meat doesn't HAVE an inner world.

You can learn a lot about the way someone looks but it's not necessarily always true. For example if you see someone wandering around unshaven and dirty, they might not be an uncleanly person they may simply have forgotten to shave that day and fallen in mud. What someone looks like is a good indication of what they are actually like, but it is not foolproof, maybe sixty percent of the time it works.

What's really funny is judging people by their name, before you've ever met them. It always seems like people fall into the persona of a television character or something along those lines of a person with the same name. For example everyone named Jason is an asshat, and everyone named Winnie is fat. It's a fact!


I am the Lord and Master of being totally unaware of what I am saying, thus always saying the wrong thing on accident.

Wow, I totally laughed at that, really, really fun!

Well, on topic again. I don't think it's possible to totally explain how someone is by making a conclusion that a person by example is gay, but sometimes I actually doubt my own thoughts about the whole thing. Some people admit that they can, and when they do guess, sometimes they are right too, maybe it's out of a mere accident, but I think some of them actually have something to look at, that's not random.

But really, I don't know.

You can find out a bunch of stuff about a person based on their appearance, and their clothes.. etc.. Like who is a goth, or a hippy... XD

But usually, looks won't really tell you much bout the person..

Agreed. 90% of communication is made without words, and a lot of that is through body language.

Generally you can get a good feel for what a person is like by their facial expressions. You can tell if they're mad, sad, happy, aggitated, etc... But you cant really judge the person as a whole, throughout their whole life, by looking at them once.

Well that was a profound and controversial statement =P

Then I guess we are discussing this thread only at 10%. Sigh.

I hear the number 80% more often from psychology graduates, concerning how much of language is body, but I don't know where that number comes from either (except that my teacher says it). It's why I really didn't want to use the stat, because I knew it would sound like it was coming out of my ***. But yeah, it's a widly agreed you don't use more than 20% to communicate in writing over the internet. Even less if you're bad at setting a tone for your writing, or you don't have enough time.

For example, your post's tone could have been read as: irritated and skeptical or sad and relective. I took it as irritated and skeptical, but it's really a coin flip deciding if you are.



http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb06/egos.html

Detailing an experiment of interest, which tests how people think they can convey a message correctly, or read a message correctly, and how often they are actually successful. It turns out to be not much better than 50%. I hear my teacher reference this experiment a lot, so I'm pretty sure it's not fabricated. But who knows, maybe he's using the same source as me.

I probably do it a lot, maybe even in this post too, but it's really baffelling how we always think our tone is obvious, and will sometimes even leave out more solid, factual statements, because of this. One reason Serious Discussion is a joke, anyway.

You mean Judging people in general? Male or female? I do it. I'm just shallow that way, but i'm not super picky with my girls though.