By Grace Evans
You walk into a room and meet someone for the first time. Before you’ve learned where they’re from, what they do, or even whether they prefer dogs or cats, your brain has already started forming an opinion. Friendly. Intimidating. Confident. Trustworthy. All of this happens astonishingly fast.
Researchers Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov at Princeton University found that people began forming impressions of qualities such as trustworthiness, competence and likeability after seeing an unfamiliar face for just 100 milliseconds. That’s one-tenth of a second. Even more interesting, giving participants additional time often increased their confidence in those judgments without substantially changing the impressions they had already formed. In other words, your brain can make up its mind before you’ve had much of a chance to think. Why are we so quick to judge?
Part of the answer may lie in the basic job our brains have always performed: rapidly making sense of the people and situations around us. Is this person friendly? Is something wrong? Should I approach or keep my distance? We constantly gather information from facial expressions, posture, eye contact, tone of voice and behavior. That ability can be remarkably useful. It can also be remarkably unfair.
Imagine meeting someone at a party who barely speaks and avoids eye contact. You might leave thinking, “She certainly wasn’t very friendly.” But perhaps she was painfully shy. Maybe she had just received upsetting news. Or perhaps she simply felt uncomfortable walking into a room where she knew no one. You observed something real. Your interpretation of why it happened may be completely wrong.
That distinction is important because first impressions are not always useless. Psychologists have studied something called “thin-slice” judgments, our ability to draw conclusions from very brief glimpses of behavior. Research published in the Journal of Research in Personality found that people could make moderately accurate judgments about certain characteristics after only five seconds of observation. But accuracy depended heavily on what they were trying to judge. Some characteristics became easier to assess with additional exposure, while others remained much harder to read. Your instincts may pick up something meaningful, they’re just not mind readers.
Our biggest mistake may be taking that first impression and turning it into a finished biography. A person who appears confident becomes arrogant. Someone who is quiet becomes unfriendly. We take one piece of information and start filling in the blanks.
A person’s appearance complicates things further.
Then something else happens. Once we have decided what we think about someone, we tend to notice things that support our original opinion. Suppose you decide a new coworker is inconsiderate. The next time she walks past without saying hello, you think, “I knew it.” But when she brings coffee for everyone the following morning, you may treat that as an exception rather than evidence that your original assessment deserves reconsideration. That’s one reason an inaccurate first impression can have such staying power.
Of course, there is another side to this story: we are someone else’s first impression, too. That can be useful to remember before a job interview, first date, business meeting or introduction to a new neighbor. You don’t need to manufacture a personality or become the most charismatic person in the room. Small signals matter. Looking up from your phone, making eye contact when appropriate, offering a genuine smile, or being a good listener.
The next time you immediately dislike someone, try becoming curious about your reaction. What exactly caused it? Was it something the person actually did, or something you assumed about what the behavior meant? Likewise, be careful when your first impression is overwhelmingly positive. We tend to talk about trusting our gut only when our gut is warning us about someone, but positive snap judgments can be wrong, too. Charm isn’t character, confidence isn’t competence, and a warm first meeting doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about someone.
Time reveals information that first impressions simply cannot. Perhaps that’s the most useful lesson from the science. Think about the people you love today. There’s a good chance at least one of them didn’t impress you very much when you first met. Perhaps you thought your closest friend talked too much. Your spouse seemed aloof. The coworker who eventually became a treasured friend initially drove you crazy. Fortunately, you kept gathering evidence.
First impressions have their place. They help us navigate a complicated social world and occasionally alert us to things worth noticing. But they deserve to be treated as a first draft, not a final verdict.
