A post by Bastian Jaeger, Willem Sleegers, Julia Stern, Lars Penke, & Alex Jones
First impressions can be powerful. When scrolling through social media, when swiping left or right in a dating app, or when sorting through the applications of job candidates, we often have to judge others based on minimal information. One thing that we usually pay attention to is what a person looks like. The idea that we can learn something about a person’s character from their appearance has been around for a long time (Lavater, 1775). Writings on how to judge others based on their looks date back to Ancient Greece. During the 1800s, physiognomy (or face-reading) handbooks were extremely popular. These writings would outline, for example, how you can judge someone based on the shape of their nose. Many of these ideas were based on racial prejudices and stereotypes and psychologists started to systematically debunk them in the 1920s (Cleeton & Knight, 1924).
Nowadays, physiognomy is widely seen as pseudoscience. Still, people tend to be quite confident that their first impressions of others are at least somewhat accurate and there is some evidence that they could be right (Letzring et al., 2021). Previous research suggests that a short conversation with someone is enough to give people a sense of how outgoing their counterpart is. Sociable people are more talkative, and it seems like people pick up on this during a conversation. Paying attention to the right cues can help us form accurate first impressions. But what about situations where all we know about a person is what they look like? How accurate are those very first impressions, that are formed during the first few seconds?
We conducted two studies to tackle this question (Jaeger et al., 2024). Specifically, we were interested in two related questions. First, we wanted to test how accurate very first impressions, based on just a facial photograph, really are. Second, we wanted to find out if people are aware of their (in)accuracy. When people are confident in their first impressions, does that mean they are more accurate?
In our first study, we showed participants photographs of 140 female students. The photos were taken in a lab in Germany, and everyone was asked to adopt a neutral facial expression. We showed these photographs to our participants and asked them to rate each individual’s personality. For example, we asked them to rate how agreeable (sympathetic and warm, rather than critical or quarrelsome) the person in the photo is. Our participants rated the photographs on all dimensions of the Big Five. Crucially, the people in the photographs had completed a self-report personality questionnaire that assessed the same dimensions earlier. This allowed us to compare our participants’ ratings with the self-reported scores of the people in the photos. If the first impressions of our participants are at least somewhat accurate, then we should see that, for example, people who report being more agreeable should also be rated as such. But that’s not what we found. There was no relation between the first impressions of our participants and the actual self-reported scores of the people in the photos, for any of the five personality dimensions. In other words, participants’ first impressions were completely inaccurate.
Interestingly, it seems like our participants were also unaware of how (in)accurate their impressions are. For every first impression that they gave, we asked participants to tell us how confident they are in the accuracy of their judgment. A participant’s confidence varied quite a lot across the different judgments they were making – sometimes they thought that they could really tell what the person in the photos was like in terms of one personality dimension, and they were less sure about another dimension. But these feelings did not relate to accuracy levels at all. That is, participants’ first impressions were inaccurate even when they had a strong gut feeling that they were right. Participants who were chronically confident in their first impressions were also not better at judging others than participants who were more skeptical about their first impressions.
In our second study, we made the judgment task a bit easier to see if this would allow participants to form more accurate impressions. We showed them pairs of male and female students and participants only had to judge which person scores higher on extraversion (that is, who is more sociable and outgoing). Participants' first impressions were accurate 51% of the time, which was very close to what would be expected by chance (50%). We also asked participants to predict at the end of the study how many of the judgments they made would turn out to be correct. On average, they expected to be right 63% of the time. Thus, they overestimated their performance. In fact, 84% of our participants overestimated the accuracy of their first impressions.
Our results suggest that we put too much trust in our first impressions, at least when they are only based on someone’s appearance. Sometimes, we might have a strong gut feeling that a person is intelligent or unfriendly just from looking at their face. But our results suggest that these intuitions are misleading. In short, our studies suggest that it is better to get a second opinion on your first impressions, at least if that first impression is based only on someone’s facial appearance.
References
Cleeton, G. U., & Knight, F. B. (1924). Validity of character judgments based on external criteria. Journal of Applied Psychology, 8(2), 215–231.
Jaeger, B., Evans, A. M., Stel, M., & van Beest, I. (2022). Understanding the role of faces in person perception: Increased reliance on facial appearance when judging sociability. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 100, 104288.
Jaeger, B., Sleegers, W. W. A., Stern, J., Penke, L., & Jones, A. L. (2024). Testing perceivers’ accuracy and accuracy awareness when forming personality impressions from faces. European Journal of Personality. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/np9ec
Lavater, J. C. (1775). Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind. William Tegg and Co.
Letzring, T. D., Murphy, N. A., Allik, J., Beer, A., Zimmermann, J., & Leising, D. (2021). The judgment of personality: An overview of current empirical research findings. Personality Science, 2, e6043. https://doi.org/10.5964/ps.6043