Snap Judgments

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In modern society, so much is determined by your physical appearance. After getting my braces off I knew I would look different, however I’ve had many people tell me that I look completely different. These statements led me to ponder how much of an impact your appearance has on a stranger’s perception of you. When you watch television or look through social media, people tend to be drawn towards the nicely groomed and well dressed individuals. Based on this observation, I believe that when you approach a stranger they are going to have the most positive reaction to someone dressed in more formal apparel. Snap judgements are crucial to the human mind (Belluck, Para. 4). These judgements allow people to form quick opinions and place individuals …show more content…
My goal was to find a place with a healthy mix of diversity in age, gender, and ethnicity. I wanted to examine how one’s appearance affects the way people respond to them, specifically dressing as stereotypical poor person with raggedy clothes and unruly hair compared to the average and wealthy looking person. To accomplish this goal I dressed the role of all three. By doing what is known as guinea pig journalism, I was able to capture a first hand experience of how individuals from various socioeconomic backgrounds are perceived and ultimately treated. I took three different trips to Meijer, my first trip I dressed as a lower level individual, hair down not shaven and in bad clothes; My second trip I dressed as an average person in khaki shorts, my hair was done, and wore a normal t-shirt; My third trip I dressed more fancy with a button up dress shirt, shaved face and dress pants. In each trip I would do the same exact thing every time. First, grab a cart, then walk around the fresh produce section of Meijer. My goal was to talk to ten people and ask them the question: Would you happen to know where the corn is? A simple question like this allows for an easy way to examine how people react when asked a question by what is perceived to be someone from a different status of society. The Millennial generation …show more content…
In order to properly examine the results we must distinguish the types of responses. There are positive responses, key signals of a positive response were eye contact, generally followed formalities such as your welcome, the person had a positive aura, gave direct instructions and took time to stop their shopping and help. An average response consist of no real eye contact, conversation is rather brief, person seems unsure and slightly timid. A bad response is when the person either ignores the question completely or gives an answer such as I don’t know or I would check somewhere over there. The low level look had the results I expected, out of the ten people I asked only one kind older lady responded positively, there were five okay responses and four bad responses. This trend data exemplifies how modern day people think. The data results raise questions regarding how your age and life has shaped the way you view your surrounding people. Did they four individual who had bad responses fear my look or did they think that based solely on my appearance they were better than me. This is where our culture has shifted as technology has risen. Now it’s a materialistic challenge where everything needs a quantity or rating. On social media the number of followers you have has to be proportional to the number of people you follow, or women
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