Looks matter.
And we decide a lot about a person in the first few seconds based on what we see.
Research shows that as humans we build an image of people’s character from objective data, such as aspects of physical appearance, our brain unconsciously chooses to focus on. From our first interactions with a person, our minds make a series of inferences, we use these inferences to fill in the blanks to form our full picture of a person.
But, those inferences are not always accurate, and can lead to missed opportunities for great relationships.
“First impressions are very important. I think that they are lasting impressions, but they don’t always tell the story,” said Yolanda Turman, 50, of Westchester, Pennsylvania.
Turman and the six others that were interviewed agreed that first impressions were very important, but each individual also noted on some level the unfairness or inaccuracy of first impressions.
“They are deceiving,” said Christine Tagaris, 38, of Washington D.C.
Research shows that individuals admit to judging someone at some point without knowing anything about them.
In a study titled, First Impressions: Making Up your Mind After a 100-ms Exposure to a Face, Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov at Princeton University investigated the minimal conditions under which people make judgements.
Using five experiments, each focusing on a specific trait judgement, Willis and Todorov manipulated the exposure time participants had to unfamiliar faces to gauge how quickly they decided whether the unfamiliar faces possess this trait.
Their findings support that judgements are made after a fraction of a second of exposure to a face, and these judgements that are made after a mere tenth of a second are correlated highly with judgements made in the absence of time constraints. A tenth of a second exposure time was sufficient enough for participants to form an impression.
When exposure time was increased from 100 to 500 ms participants’ judgements became more negative, and response time decreased. And when time was increased again from 500 to 1,000 ms, trait judgements and response time did not change significantly, but confidence in those judgments increased.
“In fact, for all judgements– attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence, and aggressiveness–increased exposure time did not significantly increase the correlations,” Willis and Todorov wrote.
The results of the Willis and Todorov study suggests that additional time simply boosts one’s confidence in their judgement, but it does not change the judgement itself.
“We’re human, so we are all guilty of making snap judgements, of that I’m sure,” Turman said. “We stereotype, we make quick judgements, but I think, again, as I have matured, I have been less likely to do that as opposed to taking a psycho social look at maybe what’s going on in the person’s life.”