You are What You Wear: Unless You Moved—Effects of Attire and Posture on Person Perception

Abstract

While first impressions are often based on appearance cues, little is known about how these interact with information from other channels. The present research aimed to investigate the impact of occupational stereotypes, evoked by attire, as well as posture on person perception. For this, computer animation was used to create avatars with different types of attire (nurse, military, casual) and posture (open, closed). In Study 1 (N = 164), participants attributed significantly more empathy to avatars wearing a nurse versus a military uniform or casual outfit. When adding posture as an additional cue, Study 2 (N = 312) showed that ratings of empathy and dominance were affected by both attire and posture. This effect was replicated in Study 3 (N = 163) for female avatars in the sense that open postures in nurses increased empathy ratings and decreased dominance ratings, which both in turn led to greater perceived competence. By contrast, for male avatars, posture did not affect attributions of competence directly. Rather, attire predicted perceived dominance directly as well as through perceived empathy. The present findings suggest that both posture, and occupational information evoked by attire, are used to infer personal characteristics. However, the strength of each cue may vary with the gender of the target.

Moe-Phobia: Effect of Users' Gender on Perceived Sexuality and Likability Toward Manga-Like Virtual Agents

“…From prior studies, only appearance or sexual visual symbols were indicated as the reason for there being an impression of sexuality (Huo and Yuan, 2017 ; Wirtz et al, 2018 ). Küster et al showed that participants judged female virtual agents by what they wore (Küster et al, 2019 ). Their experiment was conducted without any verbal information.…”

“…In addition, it has been reported that what an agent and human wear affects the interaction. Küster et al showed that humans judged virtual agents by what they wear without other non-verbal information (Küster et al, 2019 ). Their study used female and male virtual agents.…”

Who to whom and why: The social nature of emotional mimicry

“…Especially, mimicry to happy faces is often still present (e. g., Bourgeois & Hess, 2008;Van der Schalk et al, 2011;Seibt et al, 2013). Happy smiles are a very potent signal of the desire to affiliate (Knutson, 1996) and there is evidence that state information on a behavioral intentions tends to override more stable sources of information (Küster, Krumhuber, & Hess, 2019). Thus, unless the target is judged very negatively (Likowski et al, 2008) the affiliative state signal of smiling may suffice to motivate affiliation.…”

Does It Pay to Treat Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019? Social Perception of Physicians Treating Patients With Coronavirus Disease 2019

“…As noted earlier, emotional expressions are perceived as social signals that tell others something about the person and the situation ( Hess and Hareli, 2019 ). In fact, the situational information provided by an emotional expression is often dominant over character information as it is more proximal to the evaluation ( Küster et al, 2019 ). However, in this study, this was only inconsistently the case.…”