Instant judgments
I am often asked how long it takes someone to make their initial judgment on a person when they first meet them.
I used to answer, “4 minutes.” This reply was based on research on the time it took job interviewers to make up their mind on the suitability of a job applicant. However, I now answer “10 seconds.”
In their remarkable studies, social psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, have shown that we often form positive or negative impressions of people in a mere “blink” or “think slice” of time.
After subjects watched three two-second video clips of professors teaching, their teaching ratings predicted the actual end-of-the-term rating by the professor’s own students.
To get a feel on someone’s energy and warmth, the researchers concluded just six seconds is usually enough.
First impressions matter because, we lock down on our first impression. Once we have made a judgment we tent to look for confirming evidence to reinforce our initial impression — good or bad.
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