You can judge 90 percent of
people’s personalities by their shoes, researchers say.......................
Researchers at the University of Kansas say that people can accurately judge 90
percent of a stranger's personality simply by looking at the person's shoes.
"Shoes convey a thin but useful slice of information about their wearers," the
authors wrote in the new study published in the Journal of Research in
Personality. "Shoes serve a practical purpose, and also serve as nonverbal cues
with symbolic messages. People tend to pay attention to the shoes they and
others wear."
Medical Daily notes that the number of detailed personality traits detected in
the study include a person's general age, their gender, income, political
affiliation, and other personality traits, including someone's emotional
stability.
Lead researcher Omri Gillath said the judgments were based on the style, cost,
color and condition of someone's shoes. In the study, 63 University of Kansas
students looked at pictures showing 208 different pairs of shoes worn by the
study's participants. Volunteers in the study were photographed in their most
commonly worn shoes, and then filled out a personality questionnaire.
So, what do your shoes say about your personality?
Some of the results were expected: People with higher incomes most commonly wore
expensive shoes, and flashier footwear was typically worn by extroverts.
However, some of the more specific results are intriguing. For example,
"practical and functional" shoes were generally worn by more "agreeable" people,
while ankle boots were more closely aligned with "aggressive" personalities.
The strangest of all may be that those who wore "uncomfortable looking" shoes
tend to have "calm" personalities.
"Shoes have great variety of styles, brands, looks, and functions. Because of
this variety, shoes can carry individual difference information, but do they? We
suggest that the answer is yes," the study authors wrote.
And if you have several pairs of new shoes or take exceptional care of them, you
may suffer from "attachment anxiety," spending an inordinate amount of time
worrying about what other people think of your appearance.
There was even a political calculation in the mix with more liberal types
wearing "shabbier and less expensive" shoes.
The researchers noted that some people will choose shoe styles to mask their
actual personality traits, but researchers noted that volunteers were also
likely to be unaware that their footwear choices were revealing deep insights
into their personalities.