Perceiving (or Spying) on a Hill

I choose to do the sitting on the bench activity except my two friends (Michael and Nathaniel) and I sat on some rocks on the top of the south hill of campus to observe the people walking by. We gave ourselves 10 minutes to observe the people that walked by. We noted details about clothing, body type, shoes, make-up, hair style, and attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. We made the rule that we were not allowed to talk to each other during the study, so that we would have to figure out only by description if we observed the same people. The study gave some really interesting results on perception. First, in the 10 minutes of allotted time, all three of us observed exactly 19 people (Nathaniel observed 18 girls and 1 guy; Michael 19 girls; Me 19 girls). When we were comparing our notes we found that Nathaniel only noted down one person that neither Michael or I noticed, Michael had 5, and I also only had one. Then we counted the number of people that were at least seen by two of us which came to 20, and only 7 people were seen by all three of us. The most difficult part of the observation was to compare notes and see how we could differentiate the people and put them together, but with colors, designs, hair style, and accessories we were able to make the distinctions. At the end of comparing we decided to average out our attractiveness scores. Nathaniel averaged a 6.3; Michael a 4.8; Weston a 5.0. This observational study was a great way to see the difference of perception between different people. We found out that Michael and I focused more on clothing to distinguish people where Nathaniel focused more on the person's face and hair. However, I realized that because we were all guys we mostly noticed the girls that were walking by and we were able to connect the dots about who we were talking about because at least two of us always had something written down in common about a person. I thought this activity was a fun, statistical way to see how guys view people and how our perceptions are fairly similar with slight differences of emphasis.