Seeing social position: visualizing class in life and death

Abstract

There is a ‘magician’ Derren Brown who has recently been featuring on British television (www.derrenbrown.co.uk). One of his tricks is to stop a passer-by in the street and then, by using his apparently ‘psychic powers’, to guess their occupation. This produces an amusingly amazed reaction from the member of the public, but what Brown does is really a more extreme version of what we do many times a day—gauging social position from visual cues. When we look at an individual we quickly process visual information that denotes where they fit in the social world, and we do this predominantly without conscious thought.