A very popular saying says that “a book should not be judged by the cover”, but the truth is that we do it continuously, and it is also something sociologically applicable: because we tend to pigeonhole people according to our first impressions . What’s more, going back to the metaphor of the book, we tend to maintain our prejudices even after having read a chapter or two of the book; that is, after having interacted face to face with the prejudiced individual.
This is what points out a study carried out by researchers from Cornell University (Ithaca, United States) who, through an experiment in which 55 people took part, came to the conclusion that our first impressions last even after interact with a person face to face .
The participants of this study, led by Vivian Zayas, associate professor of Psychology at this university center, had to observe the photograph of four women, who were smiling in some cases and maintaining a neutral expression in others. In each case, people assessed whether the woman seemed likeable to them and her personality : whether they thought she was outgoing, pleasant, emotionally stable, and open to new experiences.
One to six months later, a face-to-face meeting was organized for each participant with one of the women photographed . This face-to-face session lasted twenty minutes, and after it the participants in the experiment had to re-evaluate the woman’s sympathy and personality.
First impressions remain
The researchers found strong coincidences between how they had evaluated the photograph in their day and how they had evaluated it after the live interaction : if the participants had thought that the person in a photo had a pleasant personality, was emotionally stable and open-minded, the Impression was similar after the face-to-face meeting. The same thing happened if the woman in the photo had been prejudiced as unpleasant: the trial was held from one month to six months later, during the in-person meeting.
The most curious thing is that the participants, both those who valued positively and those who valued negatively, had interacted with the same woman . And yet, after twenty minutes of face-to-face interaction, each came away with drastically different impressions of her.
Zayas, an expert in the cognitive and affective processes that regulate close interactions, stresses on the university’s website that “facial cues are very powerful in shaping interactions, even in the presence of additional information.” “We often think that our perceptions of others are real, as real as the sun, rather than realizing that sometimes our perceptions might not be entirely correct,” he adds.
According to Zayas, a concept called “confirmation of behavior” explains, at least in part, that the criterion was maintained, and that is that the participants who had said they liked the person in the photograph tended to interact with her in a way friendlier and more involved.
As for why personality judgments persisted, the teacher explains that ‘a halo effect’ would have come into play. Participants who gave the person in the photo a positive evaluation attributed other positive characteristics of his personality . “We see an attractive person as someone socially competent, and we assume that their marriage is stable and their children are better. We go far beyond the initial judgment and make a series of positive attributions,” he emphasizes.
In a study linked to this, people said they would review their judgment of the people in the photos if they had the opportunity to meet them in person, because they would then have more information on which to base the assessment. “And people really think they would do a review of their judgments,” says the psychology professor. “But in our study, people show much more consistency in their judgments and little evidence of review .”
