Don't Judge Me

Overview

Objectives/Goals The purpose of our project was to determine whether people will judge based on appearance. We hypothesized that yes, people will judge based on appearance. Methods/Materials For our experiment, we used the following: a Goth outfit, a girly outfit, a tomboy outfit, a sloppy outfit, and a notebook for recording data. We used two different methods to obtain our data. First, we went to a crowded location and our four different outfits were modeled on separate days to random people. At our crowded location, the person that was not wearing the outfit would randomly select a stranger. With the person in the outfit a good distance away from the interviewer, they would be asked to describe the person in the outfit using only three words. The interviewer would then write down opinions and this process was repeated for the other outfits. The other method used included pictures of us in our different outfits presented in a powerpoint format to a classroom of our peers. We asked the classes to also use three words to describe each outfit and our identities were hidden when asking our peers in order to ensure no biases. The students in each class wrote the three words for each outfit on a piece of paper and submitted them to the teacher anonymously. Results When looking through the responses for both the strangers and our peers, we found that most people judged our sloppy and Goth outfits more harshly than the other two. No real difference was noted between both methods used. Conclusions/Discussion From what we gathered, people judged this way because those two outfits were more out of their comfort zones. When our outfits were more of a normal style, the judging was not as harsh. We concluded this happening because people were used to seeing dressed this way. Therefore, our experimental results did support our hypothesis. Further experiments could use a variety of different locations which are completely different from each other such a music store and a department store. We could also distinguish between males and females as well as age groups in order to see if there were any differences given in their three descriptive words.

Competition history

• CSEF 2010 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0303

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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