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APPEARANCE First impressions count
Did you know that potential clients may have made up their minds about you before you even speak to them? That’s the suggestion of a study carried out recently by researchers at Southampton Solent University. Dr Marie Stopforth, Martin Skivington and Samantha Jeffery explain more.
tend to use this information to make judgements about your personality. Arguably more importantly though, they may have made a decision about whether they want to hire you or not – even before you have had the opportunity to speak to them!
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Our brains have limited capacity to process information. We are constantly bombarded with visual, auditory and kinaesthetic stimuli which our brains try to organise and make sense of. When we meet someone for the first time, we use cues from that person to try to identify what type of person they are and to predict how they are likely to behave towards us (1). This in turn will affect our judgement of them and consequently influence how we respond to them. Because of our limited capacity to process information, we do this by using ‘person schemas’ (2). These schemas are cognitive structures that are built from previous experience over time. They are, in effect, categories that we subconsciously place people in.
While we may all like to think that this is not necessarily
ccording to our research your body langauge and the clothes you wear appear to influence how competent and approachable clients think you are. In addition, people
true and that we judge every person on their own merits, our research indicates that people formed very strong opinions regarding a personal trainer’s personality, competence and approachability from simply viewing a photograph, and that these opinions changed dramatically based on the trainer’s clothing and body language. This has been shown before in areas such as sport (3) and business (4), but this is the first time it has been investigated in an exercise setting. More than 380 participants between the ages of 18 and 44 took part in the study. They were shown one of four photographs of the same personal trainer. In one, she was wearing smart clothing and displaying positive body language (figure 1), in the second she was wearing smart clothing but displaying negative body language (figure 2), the third showed her in casual clothing but displaying positive body language (figure 3), and in the final picture she was wearing casual clothing and displaying negative body language (figure 4).
A short paragraph outlining the trainer’s qualifications and experience were also included. This was identical for all of the photographs. Care was taken to ensure that everything about the photograph remained the same; except the body language
Figure 1: Smart clothing with positive body language
Figure 2: Smart clothing with negative body language
Figure 3: Casual clothing with positive body language
Figure 4: Casual clothing with negative body language
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