Do the women in this week’s photographs have anything in common? No, nothing at all other than it is most likely that you made a judgement on what kind of person they all were based on how they looked. We think we have a good gage of people based on what we are presented with but can we really tell what is behind the mask?
We constantly use visual cues to form an opinion on someone when, in fact, they are rarely good indicators. We also use membership of massive groupings to suggest further insight, when again, they are rarely accurate in revealing what a person is actually like. Gender, race and age are the most often used generalisations when describing someone but they don’t reveal what someone behaves or thinks or emotes, which are really the most important facets of a human being and yet we still think they are good ways to ascertain what a person is like . In contrast, when we think of our own personalities, we tend to incorporate a complex array of factors that have created the person we are and yet for others, we over-simplfly their existence into belonging to some very basic and pretty gi-normous collectives.
For example, we talk about women are this, men are that and so on and so on, but how can we possibly explain the depth and diversity of our intricate minds by belonging to a group that incorporates 50% of the entire population of Earth? What can we possibly have in common with 3.5 billion people apart from our genitalia? It is also very evident that our personalities are not that affected by age either. We stay relatively the same on the inside throughout our lives, its just the outer casing that deteroriates and yet so we often judge people based on how old they are when its probably one of the least relevant aspects. As if wrinkles, or the lack of them, somehow revealed how a person was? Race is obviously another utterly inaccurate way to assign behavioural patterns to someone.
And so it seems a shame that our personality traits could not somehow be manifested visually somehow. If you were a kind person, maybe you would always have a mole on your right cheek, or if you were loyal you would have massive bushy eyebrows. Or maybe if you were a total dickhead you would have one of those noses that looked like a penis. Unfortunately external features do not indicate what’s on the inside which is why we are mostly making hugely inaccurate assumptions about people. I chose the women in these photographs as they had very strong looks and were the most likely to generate a thought process which carried a pre-conception of the type of person they were. But how could we possibly know just based on what we saw?
The most miserable face could be concealing a warm and generous character. A smile could be hiding a mean demeanour. And pretty on the outside ain’t always pretty on the inside. But what else is there to go on? We are all guilty of this. Its not even a personal failing as everyone does it. We cannot stop our brains from processing people like this but we can be aware that it’s a fundamentally flawed system and as long as we accept that, we can carry on, all the while hoping no-one is doing it to us…which inevitably they will be.