What People Subconsciously Judge You On (Especially The Opposite Sex)

Humans and other primates are highly social species, and over millions of years, our ancestors evolved powerful intuitions for processing social information. These intuitions take in data points, analyze them, and produce a feeling about the person we’ve just met — likable or not, friendly or not, trustworthy or not, attractive or not.

All of this information processing takes place outside of awareness; we’re only conscious of the final product — a "gut" feeling about the other person.

So, is there an answer to what people subconsciously judge you on? While it’s not clear what social cues our intuition uses to make personality judgments, they’re no doubt based on subtle readings of body postures, facial expressions, and vocal inflections, among other things.

In the lab, personality psychologists generate a number of attributes — laziness, self-assuredness, friendliness — and rate study participants on each to create a personality profile. Psychologists use this process to gain insight into how personality perception works.

For example, Tim is asked to assess his personality on a number of traits using a 10-point scale. In response to the question “How friendly are you?” he can respond anywhere between 0 for “extremely unfriendly” to 9 for “extremely friendly." We can also ask people who know Tim to evaluate his personality.

This process allows us to answer several questions:

• Do people view themselves as others see them?
• Do other people agree on a particular individual’s personality?
• Are people aware of how others perceive them?

There are no straightforward answers to these questions. Instead, they guide us toward the larger issue of whether personality is stable or variable and what people subconsciously judge you on. That is, do we present ourselves as the same person to all people and in all situations? Or do our personalities fundamentally change as we move from one encounter to the next? This is an issue that personality psychologists have grappled with for more than a century.

Personality profiles are also used to estimate how compatible two people are. Despite the common belief that opposites attract, plenty of social psychology research has shown that most successful relationships are based on similarity of personality traits. This is true both for friendships and for intimate relationships.

However, German psychologists Peter Borkenau and Daniel Leising argue in a recent article that using “raw” data from personality assessments doesn’t lead to good predictions of compatibility. This is because people tend to be close to the average on most of the personality traits, so we all resemble each other.

But personality is all about individual differences — how I’m different from you and how we’re both different from Tim. Borkenau and Leising maintain that we don’t evaluate people in terms of absolute personality traits, we evaluate them in terms of how much we deviate from average.

For example, the average score for a positive attribute such as “friendliness” is higher than it is for a negative attribute such as “laziness.” Knowing that Tim is high on friendliness and low on laziness tells us little about his personality. Instead, we want to know whether he’s more friendly or less lazy than the average person. Borkenau and Lessing propose that these distinctive profiles — describing how we deviate from average — are far better predictors of compatibility than raw profiles.

Still, getting an accurate personality profile can be difficult due to certain cognitive biases. (Here, by “accurate” we simply mean that all personality evaluations of a person, including that person’s self-report, tend to agree.)

People with high levels of self-esteem tend to describe their own personalities as being close to the average profile. At the same time, people also tend to describe the personalities of people they like as close to average. These findings suggest that we have a mental model of the average personality profile that we hold as an ideal. Thus, we view people we like — whether ourselves or others — as being closer to this ideal than they actually are.

It probably comes as no surprise that those who’ve known you for a long time are better judges of your personality than casual acquaintances. Yet those who know us well and like us a lot tend to put a halo around us and see our personality as more like the idealized “normal” than it really is.

Ironically, a person who knows you well but doesn’t especially like you may be a better judge of your character than your family and friends.

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David Ludden is the author of The Psychology of Language: An Integrated Approach (SAGE Publications).