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How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

judg.me

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Re: How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

#3
When showing similar types of data try to use the same type of graph. Once the reader has learnt to interpret results from one graph they can easily apply it to the next. It looks like you've cycle through every graph type Excel has to offer.

Other than that, quite interesting!

Re: How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

#4
Please consider showing more of the variation and including more information about it in your results.

You conclude, for example, that "In general, it can be concluded that people can and do make snap judgments about personality and abilities based on superficial physical characteristics."

However, a cursory stroll through ranking people on your site reveals that actually, peoples' "snap judgments" show very high subjective variability, and you see these graphs which just have data points all over the place, looking more like a uniform distribution than a clear "everyone things you look smart and extroverted."

Given this, can you profile a burst of ratings? Can you say that there are a coherent group who rated Alice as smart extrovert and Bob as smart introvert and Carol as dumb extrovert -- and can you profile their preferences? Or do most people just browse through your site clicking randomly on the axes without any real reflection on the people they're rating?

We could see this if we could see error bars, but aside from your very first image where you try to show that there is a negative correlation between smartness and sociability, info on variability seems quite nonexistent. (And even there, it is clear that the variability dwarfs the trendline.) Also, you might want to see if there are systematic biases -- what happens if you flip the introvert/extrovert axis for some IP addresses?

Re: How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

#9
The research is a good idea, an investigation of the halo effect. The population of graders wasn't mentioned, that can have a huge effect on the result. Also, was 1000 people enough to analyze 12 variables?

However, I have to say, the graphs are ugly. Eg, spikes aren't good, you could have gone with with a bar chart. Also, 3d graphs are unneeded, and in general are very hard to do right. They can't convey much information. With just 2x2 variables, there are 4 datapoints. That would be fine on a 2d picture.

Otherwise keep on with the research...

Re: How people judge your intelligence and social skills based on your looks: Take 2

#10
You claim to have proven that people make snap judgments based on superficial physical appearance. But it's based on a test in which you explicitly demanded that the test subjects do so. Failure to do so meant non-participation in your test. How can you claim to have tested the hypothesis?
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