Tuesday, June 07, 2016

[xixnyibs] Predictions of behavior based on appearance

Look at someone, for example, how they dress.  Make predictions of how they will behave based on how they dress.  (Continues the idea that a person is concretely their actions.)  When are the predictions accurate?  When they are, why are the predictions accurate?  That is, what common cause directs both how a person dresses and how that person behaves, yielding correlation?

Inspiration was gender conventions of dress: masculine and feminine dress.  If you see someone in feminine dress, what can be accurately predicted about their behavior?  If you see someone else otherwise similar but not in feminine dress, how is their behavior predicted to be different?  Many people have an intensely strong compulsion to dress according to their gender convention: not doing so is intensely uncomfortable or distasteful.  Whatever mechanism programmed that compulsion, what other behaviors did it program?

The markers of masculinity or femininity are complicated social constructions, but they are just the surface.  Looking deeper: Why does, say, femininity matter?  Why do the behaviors correlated with femininity matter?  Wild guess: imperfect information signaling mechanism to convey "I will be a good parent".

Often dress communicates social class.  However, masculinity and femininity seem separate concepts from social class.

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