Make those first impressions count!

 You never get a second chance to make a first impression (Rogers, 2013), or so the saying goes.  The idea that first impressions are important is nothing new. For example, most people understand that the first meeting with someone often sets the tone for future encounters with that person. If we ramble on nervously, say something insensitive, or come off as socially awkward, then the other party will most likely form an opinion of us that is less positive than we would like. It is for this reason that many people become nervous before meeting their significant other’s parents or interviewing for a new job.  Impressions matter…A LOT.  In fact, they matter much more than we even realize, which makes it imperative that we understand how impressions of other people are formed, and how we can influence them.

Solomon Asch (1946) introduced the theory of impression formation, which is the process of integrating information about a person’s appearance, behaviors, and perceived traits into a coherent schema of that person. Even with very small amounts of information retrieved from short periods of time, people are surprisingly good at forming fairly accurate impressions of others.  These impressions will influence how a person interacts with another person, and whether or not they like the other person.

If you watch this video from the movie Hitch, you can easily see that within just seconds people are able to form pretty strong impressions of others.

In the movie clip, it is interesting to notice the different signals that Sara is giving off even without speaking. As Hitch points out, her body language says it all. Nothing else is needed to form a first impression of Sara, which is pretty powerful.

Now, it could be that Sara is falling prey to the role schema (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), which is an organized framework of knowledge derived from her past experiences that tells her that certain people act in a certain way. Because many men hit on women in bars past experience may influence how Sara reacts to men who come to talk to her, or offer her drinks.You see, impression formation goes both ways. Before the man even says a word to her, she already has an idea of who is he is and what he wants. In this scenario, the man is playing into the role that Sara already has in her head.

So what makes Hitch's first impression on Sara so different? Well, it could be that he contradicts the aforementioned role schema of how men act in bars. Or it could be that Sara reverts to a form of cognitive heuristic, which is a mental shortcut that allowws us to process information quickly (Gilovich et al., 2002; Kahneman et al., 1982), in order to size him up. Because Sara has no previous information or experience with Hitch, she may use a form of heuristic called anchoring and adjustment (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), which allows her to use another person (the anchor) to compare with Hitch and then make adjustments based on this assessment. To further explain, Sara may have an impression of the first man as being creepy or arrogant, so she compares this impression with the way Hitch is presenting himself. Hitch certainly does not portray the same traits as the other man, so he forms a more positive impression. Because of this discrepancy, Sara may decide that Hitch is not so bad in comparison.

Funny to think that someone's bad impression could actually influence an impression of another person, but it seems that this is the case. From gathering all of this information the one thing we can be sure of is that impressions matter...so make sure you do everything in your power to make a good one, even if that means hanging out with really creepy people. Just kidding ;)

In closing, we now know that first impressions matter, that people use different strategies to make these impressions, and that these impressions are often very accurate. So whatever you do, try your best to make that first impression count!

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References

Asch, S. E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality.

Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290.

Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (2002). Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment. New York, NY US: Cambridge University Press.

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1982). On the study of statistical intuitions. Cognition, 11(2), 123-141. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(82)90022-1

Rogers, W. (2013, February 20). Thoughts and quotes. Retrieved from http://thoughts.forbes.com/thoughts/business-will-rogers-you-never-get  

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty:

Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1130.