SOCIAL AWARENESS

We all know that looks matter. What most of us don’t understand is just how much looks matter—and how difficult it is for us to ignore a person’s appearance when making a social judgment. I’m not just talking about  romantic relationships , I’m talking about all our human interactions. And I’m not just talking about the “beauty,” dimension, but also many other qualities of one’s appearance. In all of our perceptions, from vision to hearing, to the understanding we build of people’s character, our  unconscious  mind starts from whatever objective data is available to us—usually spotty—and helps to shape and construct the more complete picture we consciously perceive. In order to offer us this more complete picture, our unconscious employs clever tricks and educated guessing to fill in the blanks. In our perception of people and their perceptions of us, the hidden, subliminal mind takes limited data, and creates a picture that seems clear and real, but is actually built lar...