Our Perception of Identity

Have you ever judged someone based on their looks?  Maybe you’ve assumed someone was rude or nice because of what they were wearing.  Humans seem to draw inferences based off what we see. If everyone was blind, how would one try to impress another without them being able to see their features or flaws, since we tend to judge each other by our looks?

People usually assume that the trendier and the more expensive someone’s clothing is, the better the person is; whereas, someone who’s not could be labeled as “weird” or a “geek.”  It is difficult for people to ignore a person’s appearance when making a social judgment.  We build pictures of people’s character using what is available to us which happens to be the way someone looks.

We commonly look at what a person is wearing.We use their body image or their voice to judge a person before actually getting to talk to them. The saying, “Never judge a book by its cover” goes around often. This is to try to prevent people from judging someone they have never met before. Even with that, many people keep doing it.

 Annahi Carbajal, a freshman here at Pitman High School, stated that she has judged people by their appearance. “I often judge people by what they look like. Even though I know it’s not good to judge a book by it’s cover, it comes as a first instinct,” said Annahi.

Although she ends up judging people by their appearance, Annahi thinks that their actual personality plays a bigger role. “When  I read a book, I don’t like characters because of their appearance but for their words and actions. Same thing in real life. If someone’s appearance attracts me but their personality is unpleasant, I am obviously not going to talk to them,” declared Annahi.

Another freshman here at Pitman High, Viviana Del Real, thinks that everyone judges people based off what they look like.

“The first information that is exchanged from people before they open their mouths is their appearance. I don’t think it is right but it’s something that comes off naturally to us humans and no matter how hard we try to not ‘judge a book by it’s cover,’ it happens anyways. I don’t think it’s completely wrong to assume things about someone because of their appearance because you can kind of get a vibe that’s being given based on their body language and facial expressions. I’ve became friends with a lot of people that I never would have talked to before because they looked either snobby or rude,” commented Viviana.

It’s clear that many people go around judging others without actually getting to know them. We judge people based of the vibes they give off, what they are wearing, maybe how many piercings they have or what hairstyle they have. Even though we don’t mean to do it sometimes, we use what we see to try to get as much information about a person.