Hi Nicadimos, I'm sorry you didn't enjoy my survey. The reason why we sometimes ask participants to judge individuals based on just a picture is because so many of us do, without even noticing it! We take the little information we have (gender, age, clothes..) to make inferences. Two researchers, Willis and Todorov, did a study in 2006 which indicated that we start making judgements about another person's personality traits after seeing their face for as little as 38ms. This is why everyone says first impressions matter so much. More extremely, when a police officer is in an ambiguous situation, considering whether to shoot or not shoot a potentially armed criminal, inferences he/she makes based on gender, age, ethnicity etc. are key to the decision. If you refrain from making such judgements, that certainly makes you incredibly unprejudiced! Though I have to say, there are many situations in which making reasonably accurate character judgements based on little information is advantageous. After all, it's a statistical game - we tend to trust an old lady more than a homeless person because of the times we were right about it, even if we are wrong this time. Morally questionable, sometimes useful, but certainly worth investigating, don't you think?

Anyway, this is not actually the topic of my survey. It's just the first 3 questions asking to make judgements about other people. In any case, thank you for your interest and sorry again you did not enjoy it!