This morning I saw a cockroach on the floor.
I did not think about it. I killed it.
And a second later — not out of guilt, out of curiosity — a question arrived that I could not put down:
If it had been a butterfly, would I have done the same?
I know the answer. No. I would have opened the window.
Two insects. Neither had done anything to me. The difference in my reaction was entirely aesthetic.
But the instinct does not stop at insects
Because what made the difference was not the cockroach. It was the mechanism: an instant judgement, drawn purely from appearance, before I had a chance to think.
And that mechanism does not distinguish what it is looking at. It works on faces too — nobody just admits it there.
In 1972 three researchers — Dion, Berscheid and Walster — showed people photographs of strangers. Some attractive, some average, some not.
They asked them to judge intelligence, kindness, honesty, morality.
The attractive ones scored higher on everything.
Read that again. Not on looks — on honesty. On morality. On things that do not appear in a photograph and that nobody had any way of knowing.
The study is called "What is beautiful is good". Fifty years later they ran it again. Same result.
Who we choose to have around us
This is the part that occupies me, and the hardest to say without it sounding like an accusation.
Look at a photograph of a group of friends. Look at who is standing in the middle.
Nobody decided it. Nobody said it out loud. It just happened.
We want beautiful people near us. Not because we first asked what they think, what they have been through, or how they behave when nobody is watching. We want them because their presence makes us feel something.
And then, because nobody can bear to admit they chose with their eyes, we build the justification afterwards: "they're a really good person", "they have nice energy", "I feel comfortable around them".
All of it may be true. None of it is what decided.
And before this sounds like a sermon: I do it too. I have caught myself trusting someone faster because they were well dressed and spoke well. Having read the research did not save me — I just notice it slightly sooner now.
And it costs, in money and in years
This does not stay in questionnaires.
When it was measured in wages, less good-looking men were found to earn roughly 13% less than average-looking ones — same education, same experience. Over a working life, the gap was estimated at around $230,000.
And in mock-juror studies, attractive defendants were judged less certainly guilty and received lighter sentences.
Same act. Different face. Different punishment.
It is not even judgement. It is what you feel.
And here is the part that unsettles me most, because it shows this is not naivety.
At Caltech, twenty people were given wines to taste at different prices. Two of the wines were the same wine, served twice — once with a cheap label, once with an expensive one.
Everyone said the expensive one tasted better. And in their brains, the region that produces pleasure genuinely worked harder when they believed they were drinking the expensive one.
The label did not fool their judgement. It changed what they felt.
That changes who is at fault. We are not "falling for" a pretty surface. The surface gets inside the experience, before we have a chance to judge.
The same thing, but with an invoice
I see it in my work constantly.
"I gave the renovation to a company and they did a bad job."
I always say the same thing: show me where you went. And I see a beautiful showroom, samples laid out like jewellery, a well-dressed person who speaks well. The work? Lacking.
The same instinct. It just leaves a receipt here.
It will not change, and I know it
Let me be honest about the limits of this piece.
I do not believe humanity changes because someone wrote an article. Nor will this one change anything. If fifty years of research did not move it, it will not be moved by a Wednesday on my blog.
And it is probably not even a flaw. Fast judgement by appearance is a mechanism that kept us alive for far longer than we have had civilisation. We do not control it, any more than we control hunger.
So yes: let us accept it.
The one question appearance cannot answer
But "accept it" does not mean "do nothing".
I cannot change the fact that I will be impressed. What I can do is slow the decision down.
For a company the question is easy: show me something you have done.
For a person there is no question. There is only time. How they treat the waiter. What they do when something goes wrong. Whether they remember what you told them last time.
None of that shows in a photograph.
We will all be judged on appearance, and we will all judge on appearance. The question is not whether we get past it — we will not. It is whether we let the eye make the final decision, or only the first one.
Because the first impression is free. Everything after it requires you to be there.
I would still kill the cockroach, by the way. I just know why now.
Sources: Dion, Berscheid & Walster, "What is beautiful is good" (1972); Hamermesh & Biddle on appearance and earnings; mock-juror studies on attractiveness and sentencing; the Caltech study on price and taste. Photos: Aslam Baig (butterfly) and Cecep Rahmat (cockroach) / Unsplash.