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.

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.

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