By | Robby Berman | bigthink.com
The study “indicates that something as subtle as the signals in your face about your social class can actually then perpetuate it,” Bjornsdottir tells the University of Toronto’s Medical Xpress. “Those first impressions can become a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy. It’s going to influence your interactions and the opportunities you have.”
Their study involved two sets of students. For the first, they separated students into economic brackets based on their annual family incomes. They were most interested in the faces of students either definitively above or below a median income of $75,000. The gathered students with family incomes under $60,000 into one group and students from families with incomes over $100,000 in another. The researchers then took portrait photos of each group’s students posing as expressionlessly as possible.
University of Toronto library (UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO)
A second set of students was then asked to say whether each of the photographs showed a “rich or poor” student. About 53% of the time Hausarbeit schreiben lassen Preise, a higher percentage than random chance would predict, they got it right. The researchers say that race and gender were not found to be a factor, nor was how quickly or slowly the students made their assessments. Bjornsdottir explains that, “People are not really aware of what cues they are using when they make these judgments. If you ask them why, they don’t know. They are not aware of how they are doing this.”
