First impressions

You’ll never get a second chance to make a great first impression.” We’ve all heard that a stranger, meeting you for the first time will form an impression of you, your character, your personality — an impression, all within the first 60 seconds of meeting you.

Or wait, is it 30 seconds? Twenty?

Two or three or seven?

Forget whatever figure you may have heard. New research shows that you may need to have your act together in the blink of an eye.

A series of experiments by Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov reveal that all it takes is a tenth of a second to form an impression of a stranger from their face and that longer exposures don’t significantly alter those impressions (although they might boost your confidence in your judgments). Their research is presented in their article “First Impressions,” in Psychological Science.

Like it or not, judgments based on facial appearance play a powerful role in how we treat others, and how we get treated. research is presented in their article “First Impressions,” in Psychological Science.

Psychologists have long known that attractive people get better outcomes in practically all walks of life. People with “mature” faces receive more severe judicial outcomes than “baby-faced” people. And having a face that looks competent (as opposed to trustworthy or likable) may matter a lot in whether a person gets elected to public office.

Willis and Todorov conducted separate experiments to study judgments from facial appearance, each focusing on a different trait: attractiveness, likeability, competence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness.

For all five of the traits studied, judgments made after the briefest exposure (1/10 of a second) were highly correlated with judgments made without time constraints; and increased exposure time (1/2 or a full second) didn’t increase the correlation. Response times also revealed that participants made their judgments as quickly (if not more quickly) after seeing a face for 1/10 of a second as they did if given a longer glimpse.