According to one of my former boyfriends, he absolutely hated me when first we met. I have to say the feeling was mutual. I had just gotten off a red-eye from New York to London and was tired, cranky, and hadn’t showered. No wonder he didn’t love me right off the bat.
After we got to know each other, however, we embarked on a yearlong, extremely satisfying relationship of mutual respect and appreciation, proving that first impressions don’t always last.
Or do they? Researchers of psychology and behavior seem to think so. Their work has shed light on why we form first impressions and how they affect our relationships. But I wonder—are we doomed to live up to the image we project in the first thirty seconds of meeting someone, as these researchers claim?
The Invisible Checklist
Our brains consider many factors when forming first impressions. In general, we make associations between people and positive feelings. For example, the authors of an October 2008 study published in the journal Science found that people who held a hot cup of coffee for ten to twenty-five seconds before meeting someone rated their first impressions of the stranger more positively than those who held iced coffee. The subjects literally “warmed” to the people they were meeting because they associated the strangers with the comforting feeling of gentle heat.
Though the authors of this study did not speculate on the cause for the connection, evolutionary biology may be at play here. When we are happy and secure, we have less reason to feel threatened by strangers and are less likely to want to distance ourselves from them as a defense mechanism. In other words, if I’m not in danger of being hungry or cold, I don’t have to worry as much that you’ll steal the wood I need to make fire and I can be nice to you instead.
In addition to concrete feelings like warmth, our brains process a variety of sensations when we meet someone for the first time. Facial expressions are key—a smile versus a frown makes us register to others as a friend, not a foe—as are all the factors that affect our general levels of comfort and senses of security. Color and proportion matter because our brains register incongruities of any kind as jarring. If someone with a warm complexion is wearing cool colors, for example, or a set of clothes that doesn’t fit them well, our animal brains will tell us that something is amiss and dangerous, and we will form a negative impression associated with that person.
First Impressions That Last
Because this reaction to others is so basic and primal, it happens very quickly. Research, as in
