To assess people in relation to their appearance leads to commit big mistakes in the evaluation of their abilities. So we can have a very positive view of people who dress well, have an expensive car or are good looking. The positive that we attach to these features lead us to attribute to these people other skills, probably they are honest, intelligent, good at work and so on . There is a halo effect for which we tend to see them as more reliable than others that do not appear in the same way . This is a clear example of when looks can be deceiving and unfortunately two facts of these days we have highlighted once again how easily we let ourselves be influenced by apparent factors of life. The first fact is OCSE data for which Italians are a population of new illiterates. Indeed, we are the last countries for language skills and penultimate in mathematics among the more developed The conclusion is tragic only one in three has skills to live in the XXI century. But apparently this fact does not seem so obvious; but it’s a country where 75 % of business owners do not read one book a year, better spend on a new home or a new SUV or their children in a private school where they will be promoted without studying. As we can compete with the top class of other countries such as Japan, Finland , the Netherlands, Estonia and Slovakia (among others) that dominate us all?
The second fact is now a case of negative bias : young Moroccan who sells lighters to live on the streets of Turin. On the basis of its appearance we tend to associate with this situation a lack of skills due to humble work he carries out. But this is not the case, because Khadiri Abdelmoula Rachid , 26 years old, has just graduated in civil engineering from the Polytechnic University with a thesis on “Graphene and its potential ” and how himself there are so many other great stories, that we can read about in the newspapers today . These people, unlike the two -thirds of Italians, have the skills for living in the twenty-first century.
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