First impression (psychology)

In psychology, a first impression is the event when one person first encounters another person and forms a mental image of that person. Impression accuracy varies depending on the observer and the target (person, object, scene, etc.) being observed.First impressions are based on a wide range of characteristics: age, race, culture, language, gender, physical appearance, accent, posture, voice, number of people present, and time allowed to process.The first impressions individuals give to others could greatly influence how they are treated and viewed in many contexts of everyday life. In psychology, a first impression is the event when one person first encounters another person and forms a mental image of that person. Impression accuracy varies depending on the observer and the target (person, object, scene, etc.) being observed.First impressions are based on a wide range of characteristics: age, race, culture, language, gender, physical appearance, accent, posture, voice, number of people present, and time allowed to process.The first impressions individuals give to others could greatly influence how they are treated and viewed in many contexts of everyday life. Per Study Harvard Business School first impression research suggests that people respond more positively to someone who comes across as trustworthy rather than confident. “Power Posing  by Social psychologist Amy Cuddy' It takes just one-tenth of a second for us to judge someone and make a first impression. Research finds that the more time participants are afforded to form the impression, the more confidence in impressions they report. Not only are people quick to form first impressions, they are also fairly accurate when the target presents him or herself genuinely. People are generally not good at perceiving feigned emotions or detecting lies. Research participants who reported forming accurate impressions of specific targets did tend to have more accurate perceptions of specific targets that aligned with others' reports of the target. Individuals are also fairly reliable at understanding the first impression that he/she will project to others. The rate at which different qualities are detected in first impressions may be linked to what has been important to survival from an evolutionary perspective. For example, trustworthiness and attractiveness were the two traits most quickly detected and evaluated in a study of human faces. People are fairly good at assessing personality traits of others in general, but there appears to be a difference in first impression judgments between older and younger adults. Older adults judged young adult target photos as healthier, more trustworthy, and less hostile, but more aggressive, than younger adults did of the same photos. Older adults could have a lower response to negative cues due to a slower processing speed, causing them to see facial features on young adults as more positive than younger adults do. One's first impressions are affected by whether he or she is alone or with any number of people. Joint experiences are more globally processed (see global precedence for more on processing), as in collectivist cultures. Global processing emphasizes first impressions more because the collective first impression tends to remain stable over time. Solo experiences tend to facilitate local processing, causing the viewer to take a more critical look at the target. Thus, individuals are more likely to have negative first impressions than groups of two or more viewers of the same target. At the same time, individuals are more likely to experience an upward trend over the course of a series of impressions, e.g. individual viewers will like the final episode of a TV season more than the first even if it is really the same quality. When viewing pieces of art in an experiment, participants in a solo context rated art in an improving sequence significantly higher than when the targets are presented in a declining sequence. When viewing the art in a joint context, participants evaluated the first and last pieces similarly in both kinds of sequence. Simply priming viewers to feel like they were in solo or joint contexts or to process analytically or holistically was enough to produce the same viewing effects. Similar to the number of viewers present, collectivism versus individualism can influence impression formation. Collectivists are at ease as long as their impressions are largely in alignment with the larger group's impressions. When a collectivist wants to change his/her impression, he/she may be compelled to change the views of all group members. However, this could be challenging for collectivists, who tend to be less confrontational than individualists. Individualists are willing to change their own views at will and are generally more comfortable with uncertainty, which makes them naturally more willing to change their impressions. Research is mixed on whether national culture mediates the relationship between media richness and bias in impression formation. Some studies that manipulated media richness have found that information presented in text form yields similar impressions (measured by reported appraisal scores) among cultures, while other studies found that richer forms of information such as videos reduce cross-cultural bias more effectively. The latter findings support Media Richness Theory. Accents and unique speech patterns can influence how people are perceived by those to whom they are speaking. For example, when hypothetically interviewing an applicant with a Midwestern U.S. accent, Colombian accent, or French accent, Midwestern U.S. participants evaluated the U.S. accent as significantly more positive than the applicant with the French accent due to perceived similarity to themselves. The evaluation of the applicant with the Colombian accent did not, however, differ significantly from the other two. First impressions can be heavily influenced by a similarity-attraction hypothesis where others are immediately put into “similar' or “dissimilar” categories from the viewer and judged accordingly.