Awaiting rendering to finish (again) so I read through some of my own posts, and realized that it's hard to take people seriously when they've got a
Dancing Mafia Cat in a Suit, or a cartoon bunny stuffing its face with carrots, as their avatar. It's a different matter, of course, if Chibi Goku tries to explain stuff (he'd be more interested in chicken and rice). FaustWolf's posts immediately strikes as "words of a wise and experienced dude" without question at first glance (and his calm and humorous style only amplifies that appeal), whereas Thought seems like a man who has climbed the mountain and looks upon the world with eyes that have seen everything. The some goes for others: Manly Man appears contrary and sends mixed messages with his Flea avatar, Syna charms with her... um.. (okay, I don't want to explain), ZeaLitY signifies as a charismatic square-jawed American who's ready for a challenge with his Tron avatar, MrBekkler being an intelligent but innocent smiley face, Alfadoredux simply
glaring at you with those mean beastly eyes of his, Boo being a cute shadow monster from the wild that might try to scare you with his adorable teddy-bear voice, RushingWind who's beautiful soul leaks onto the pages she writes, Shee as a humorous black guy who ran out of bubblegum, and Alcyone and V_Translanka look like cartoon. I guess Saj would be the only one who's avatars send undistorted messages about her nature.
That said, I remember having dancing hamsters in my signature too, and I ponder what emotions my post would invoke if they were still around. Then with Princess Schala Zeal's signature, almost every post she (he?) makes these days looks like spam regardless of the content.
Perhaps I'm overly imaginative, and I can generally look beyond such notions and pay attention to the content than the appeal, but understandably for others that's just not the case. Even in real life, where people don't stamp their faces with forum avatars (I'd love to be a dancing cat in a suit), appearance matters in
everything majority: it dictates your likeliness of getting a job, maintaining social relations, your "first impression" and influencing people's judgement about you, development of your own personality, emotions and health, etc. I'm not saying that "better looking people are better", because I don't think in those lines; I'm saying that depending on your look and the messages (looks and body language) you bring forth in circumstances will highly influence what other people think about you regardless of what you have to say, and the reason behind this is that these body languages are
usually right in determining a person's nature, however the perception bias of an individual is most likely to distort their judgement. In that spirit I would also like to point out that there
actually are plenty of upsides to being ugly and downsides of being pretty.
MOAR PSYCHOLOGY!
