Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

party where there are many other stu-
dents from your campus that you’d like to 
get to know. In either case, you might be 
focused on how well you’re coming across 
and thinking that you have only a few 
minutes to make a good fi rst impression—
and that’s where you’re wrong. Whatever 
impression you were going to make, you 
did so already.
At least that’s the surprising fi nding of 
recent research on how people make judg-
ments of others’ personality. For instance, 
in one study, participants were shown pho-
tographs of faces of unfamiliar people and 
asked to rate those people on a number of 
characteristics, such as attractiveness, 
trustworthiness, and competence. These 
participants showed high agreement in 
their judgments of these characteristics. 
Then another group of participants were 
shown the same photographs, but they 
were asked to make the same judgments 
under time constraints. In some cases the 
judgment had to be made in 1 second, in 
others in 
1
∕
2 
of a second, and in still others 
in just 
1
∕
10
of a second (Willis & Todorov, 
2006; Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008).
When the time-constrained judgments 
were compared to the judgments made 
• Do you think people should attempt to override their fi rst judgments about others’ 
personalities and make more thoughtful judgments? Why or why not?
• Why would the ability to judge personality characteristics quickly be valuable from 
an evolutionary perspective?
RETHINK
constraint made no difference—the judg-
ments made in 
1
∕
10
of a second were just as 
accurate as those made in a 
1
∕
2
or 1 second.
What these fi ndings suggest is that 
people make virtually instantaneous 
judgments about others essentially the 
moment that they lay eyes on them. This 
may be particularly true of judgments 
about attractiveness and trustworthiness, 
which the participants were able to assess 
most quickly. But even other types of 
judgments—such as a person’s sexual 
orientation—are made extremely quickly; 
sometimes such quick judgments are 
more accurate than those made more 
thoughtfully and deliberately (Rule, 
Amabady, & Hallett, 2009). 
Researchers have theorized that the 
ability to judge characteristics quickly and 
accurately may have evolved in humans 
because it once had survival value. Today 
it means, for better or for worse, that we 
accurately size each other up at just a 
glance (Todorov & Duchaine, 2008; Oveis 
et al., 2009). 
with no time constraints, the researchers 
found that the judgments were extremely 
similar. Moreover, the length of the time 
Research has found that fi rst impressions 
are made almost instantaneously.
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