Let's face it: we all judge people by their appearance.
It is unavoidable since looks are one of the first aspects of someone that people see and are able to process. What is important, however, is what you do when you make a certain judgment towards someone. If societal beauty standards rule over a person's willingness to hire or be friends with someone, then this perception turns really harmful and misleading.
What I recently learned was that there is actually a term for this called lookism, where people who look more pleasing to the eye are given benefits and are associated with positive things while unattractive people are not.
Although dramatized, examples of lookism can be seen in this very entertaining webcomic called Lookism by Park Tae-joon, which made me curious about the concept of lookism and inspired me to research it.
As I organized my thoughts to write this article, I realized just how many things I can discuss relating to lookism but the main part I want to focus on is recognizing the implications of defining people by their outward appearance on other people, as well as yourself.
Why is appearance or, rather, making a great first impression, heavily emphasized in situations such as interview? Why is it so important?
According to a study done in 2006 by Princeton psychologists, people tend to make more decisive and quicker judgments on trustworthiness and attractiveness of other people in a short period of time. The times that a participant was exposed to pictures of strangers were 100 milliseconds (ms), 500 ms, and then 1,000 ms, which is equal to one second. The longer the exposure, the more confident the participants were about their judgments.
However, the more you get to know a person, your perception of them is likely to change.
Of course, implications of this discriminatory behavior based on outward appearance has damaging effects on the people that face this discrimination. For example, Hillary Clinton, over her many appearances in public during her time working in the White House, endured a lot of criticism, which included her appearance at times.
It is notable that women face a lot of stricter beauty standards than men in society, which does lead a lot of girls to feel insecure about themselves.
In addition to being interlinked with sexism, lookism is also related to racism. With harmful stereotypes about certain races in America, it can influence people that are not very aware of what other races go through to say and do certain things.
Examples of this are police brutality and police traffic stops, the latter being especially prevalent in the news within the past couple of years. Black Americans, by far, are the most affected by police brutality.
Also, according to the findings of a Stanford open policing project, black and Latino Americans are generally stopped by the police more frequently than white Americans. One can argue that the reason for this is based on statistics of which race has a higher rate of crime or whatnot, but by perpetuating harmful stereotypes or killing a person and then get away with it because they felt "threatened" (by his blackness, I suppose), does not facilitate change but rather worsens the relationship between an institution and its community.
All of this is to say something that is quite the obvious but yet, it seems to be a difficult concept to put into practice: don't judge a book by its cover. A simple way to fend off lookism is to do a self-assessment by recognizing when you are reacting positively or negatively to someone you just met based on their appearance.
It is also vital to recognize if you are supporting anyone that might have some troubling ideas or have said very harmful things. Celebrities tend to make their fans see things they do through rose-colored glasses.
One example of this is the recent antics of a popular Youtuber, Logan Paul, who has a fanbase of mostly pre-teens. Even after his inhumane actions, people, oddly enough, still defend him. Why? Because he is handsome? Because he looks like Donald Trump if Donald Trump was a surfer dude? Because he did this nice thing at one point in time?
Even if it is a famous or beautiful celebrity, if someone did something horribly wrong, he or she deserves to be called out for it, not defended while there are innocent people who are deemed to look like a "criminal" and suffer as a result.
Overall, lookism really affects how people view themselves and has some serious implications in many areas in social and professional life, and I hope by reading this article that people can reflect on if they had made certain associations (trustworthiness, ability, talent, etc) with a person they just met that were based on their attractiveness.