Vanessa Van Edwards breaks down how first impressions work: roughly half come from unchangeable physical traits like face shape, half from signals you control like clothing and posture. A single profile picture lets people guess four of five personality traits with 76% accuracy, so your visual presentation matters far more than most people think.
most of what we're signaling to others is our social signals, our cues. We have to think about our traits, like what we're signaling— that's called social signals or our cues— versus just the shape of our face, the way that we look, what we're wearing. But we also have a baseline. I would even say 50% is just our face shape, our hair, our body shape. We can tell a lot by just that thin slice, that first impression. They even found that when someone looks at a profile picture of someone, they can guess 4 out of 5 personality traits with 76% accuracy. What?! So when you're looking at a Tinder profile, you might not be wrong. I was taught, don't judge a book by its cover. We do judge books by their cover, and this is really important for us to know. If we can't help but judge a book by its cover, shouldn't we have the best possible cover? And then social signal on purpose.
