Making Snap Judgements

Talk about snap judgments! Did you know that people decide whether another person is trustworthy within a tenth of a second?? This is based on the results of a recent Princeton study. This personally makes a lot of sense to me. I have recently come into contact with a few people who I could tell in the first few seconds had made up their mind about me. Some liked me right away, and some clearly didn't. Even though I presented myself the same way.

"If given more time, people's fundamental judgment about faces did not change," said Princeton University psychologist Alex Todorov. "Observers simply became more confident in their judgments as the duration lengthened." It all suggests snap judgments are common and totally vary based on the individual.

"The link between facial features and character may be tenuous at best, but that doesn't stop our minds from sizing other people up at a glance," he said. "We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them. It appears that we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way."

Meanwhile, he has no clue what we look for.

"We still don't know the physical features of a face that lead to a particular trait inference," he said. "We know generally what makes a face attractive, such as its symmetry, the proportions of its parts and the like. But what is it about a face that makes you think its owner is an essentially competent person? That's the subject of another study, one that needs to be done."

Great, so we don't know how or why some people make these snap judgments yet? Hmmmm, and I think I do it to. Today I met a manager of a hotel. Had I walked away in the first 5 seconds of our meeting I would have said she wasn't someone I would be friends with. But after an hour of talking, I realized she was really great.

We have nothing but our perceiving to base judgment on. Thus, we must judge people on our perceptions of them. There really and truly is no other choice. If your preconceived concepts of people get in the way of your understanding them, this is a bad thing. But preconceptions are quite different from perceptions. Our perceptions may indeed be imperfect. But an imperfect understanding still beats random guessing by a long shot.

Perception is only as good as the perceiver.