In this video I discuss how we form impressions of others and how quickly and accurately we are able to form impressions. Thin slices theory suggests that we’re able to form impressions fairly quickly, though it’s unclear if these first impressions are accurate, resistant to change, or strengthened by confirmation bias. Even single word descriptions such as “warm” or “cold” can influence our impressions, even when other information remains the same. This suggests that we need to be careful with first impressions. Just because we can form impressions quickly doesn’t mean that we should. Instead, we should aim to give ourselves time to consider more information, minimize our tendency toward confirmation bias, and reduce the possibility of creating self-fulfilling prophecies.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to see future videos! Have questions or topics you’d like to see covered in a future video? Let me know by commenting or sending me an email!
Check out my full psychology guide: Master Introductory Psychology: http://amzn.to/2eTqm5s
Video Transcript
Hi I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to consider impression formation. How is it that we form impressions of others? And how long does it take us to form these impressions?
From what we’ve learned in previous videos about heuristics, you might not be surprised to hear that we form impressions very rapidly and this brings us to what’s called “thin slices theory“. And this is based on research by Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal and what these researchers did was they had college students watch ten-second silent video clips of professors teaching a class and these ten-second clips were randomly selected from video of larger lectures. Then the students were asked to rate these professors. And what the researchers found was that the mean ratings were actually reliable predictors of the actual end of semester student evaluations for those professors. In other words, the students were able to come up with pretty much the same ratings after watching a 10-second silent clip as the students who were actually in the class for an entire semester.
Now other studies have found similar things supporting the idea of thin slices theory. So other studies have looked at things like people’s ability to predict Big Five personality traits within a matter of seconds, and they’ve also found support for this idea of thin slices theory. So what does this mean? Are we really this fast and accurate in forming our impressions of others? Are we really this good?
Well that could be the case, but this raises a number of other questions. Perhaps it’s the case that our first impressions are shaping our subsequent evaluations. Maybe for the students who are in a class, they form an impression of the professor within the first few seconds, and then that first impression influences how they perceive the professor throughout the rest of the class, and therefore it influences their evaluations at the end of the semester. And that’s why they’re similar to the students who just saw the 10-second clip. Or it could be the case that our first impressions are resistant to change; that we form impressions quickly and then it doesn’t really matter what happens after that and we’ll stick with our first impression. Or it could be the case that we have confirmation bias going on; that we form an initial impression and then we only look for evidence that supports that first impression and we tend to ignore the contradictory evidence.
Now one way we can see how early impressions influence subsequent judgments comes from an earlier study by Harold Kelly. What Kelly did was he gave students a description of a guest speaker and the students received the same description with the exception of one word. So they were told some of the traits of this guest speaker; that he was industrious and hardworking and considered by many to be a rather warm person, or considered by many to be a rather cold person. And otherwise the descriptions were the same. The students then watched the same lecture by this guest speaker and yet this description whether included the word “warm” or the word “cold” actually influenced the students ratings. So what does this mean? Should we just dispense with these course evaluations at the end of the semester? Maybe we should just get our evaluations within the first 10 seconds of class. Should we dispense with detailed personality assessments that take a great deal of time? After all, perhaps we could just predict the Big Five personality traits within a matter of seconds.
Well, it’s important to remember that these first impressions can be inaccurate and so when we see that in general there’s reliable predictions across groups of students on average, this doesn’t mean of course that every student’s first impression is accurate. And so we can’t judge just based on the first impression. And our level of confidence might mislead us. So we might be very confident in our initial impressions; that doesn’t mean that they’re actually accurate. So just because we can make snap judgments that aren’t too bad doesn’t mean that we should.
And so we can think of having more information as generally being a good thing, in sort of filling out the details of our initial impressions. We can revise those initial impressions based on subsequent experiences and we can make conscious efforts to try to minimize confirmation bias. We can try to look for areas where we may have been wrong, where we may have formed a poor first impression, and we can try to avoid self-fulfilling prophecies.
One problem that we have is if we believe a person to be a certain way, we might change our behavior towards that person, and that might actually bring out some of the characteristic that we’re looking for. That would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if I believe that somebody is rude and then I always treat them in a rather curt manner, they might, in turn, be rude back to me and that would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So if I recognize that maybe my initial impression is wrong and maybe I’ve been misled then maybe I can avoid causing this self-fulfilling prophecy. Ok, I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
