81. People Listen to and Are Persuaded By Those Similar To/Attractive to Them

People are more likely to listen to and be persuaded by you if they find you attractive, believe you are similar to them, or both. (In case you think that some people might be affected in this way, but not you—everyone is affected by the factors of attractiveness and similarity.)

You Have Three Brains, Not One

In my book Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?, I write about unconscious mental processing and the new brain, the mid/emotional brain, and the old brain.

The old brains of your audience will be evaluating whether or not you are attractive. If they decide you are attractive, then you will be able to initially grab the audience’s attention—and possibly hold it (if you are really attractive!). This decision about your attractiveness will be based on the geometry and symmetry of your face, what you are wearing, and various “programmed” as well as learned factors about what attractive means.

What’s important to remember is that your audience is using all three brains in responding to you. Unconsciously, the mid-brains of your audience are deciding whether to trust you and be friends with you—they are unconsciously evaluating whether you are similar to them. Unconsciously, the old brains of your audience are deciding whether you are a possible partner for sex and whether the environment is safe enough to stay in the room.

Similar is Better

Similarity builds rapport. If people feel that you are like them, then they will tend to like and trust you more. People find it easier to like those they are similar to or those they perceive as sharing their background or values. It can even boil down to clothes—people like people who are dressed similarly to them.

Vote for the Most Attractive Person?

Efran and Patterson (1974) analyzed elections in Canada and found that attractive candidates received more than 2.5 times as many votes, despite the fact that 73 percent of voters said that attractiveness did not influence their vote. Robert Cialdini (2007) reports on the large body of research that shows that people who are physically attractive are perceived to be smarter, more capable, and more intelligent.

A Mathematical Formula for Attractiveness

Hatice Gunes and Massimo Piccardi (2006) took many different measurements of human faces. For example, they measured the distance from the top of the eyes to the bottom of the chin, the distance from the top of the eyes to the bottom of the nostrils, and so on. They compared these measurements to people’s ratings of who was attractive. They found that most people agreed on who was attractive and that those rated as attractive had certain proportions to their facial structures. Although attractiveness is affected by cultural and surface norms, such as clothing and hair, there does seem to be a mathematical basis to decisions about who is attractive, and that basis seems to hold true across cultures.

Of course, people in your audience don’t take a ruler to your face before they decide whether you are attractive or not. The unconscious is able to process these mathematical proportions in the blink of an eye, and it sends information to other parts of our brain that says whether this person is attractive and should be listened to.