Positive general impression of someone, we often see their specific traits more positively. This isĪn important factor in explaining the halo effect, which is the influence of a global positive evaluation of a person on perceptions of their specific traits. Once we have formed a positive impression, the new negative information just doesn’t seem as bad as it might have been had we learned it first. When the information about the negative features comes later, these negatives will be assimilated into the existing knowledge more than the existing knowledge isĪccommodated to fit the new information. If we learn that a person is “intelligent” and “industrious,” those traits become cognitively accessible, which leads us to develop a positiveĮxpectancy about the person.
Schema, it becomes difficult to change it. Thinking back to Chapter 2 and the discussion of social cognition, we can see that this of course is a classic case of assimilation-once we have developed a Not surprisingly, then, we are more likely to show the primacy effect when we are tired than when we are wide awake and when we are distracted than when we are paying attention (Webster,Īnother reason for the primacy effect is that the early traits lead us to form an initial expectancy about the person, and once that expectancy is formed, we tend to process information in ways
#First impressions matter quotes series
In fact, when people read a series of statements about a person, the amount of time they spend reading the items declines with each new piece of information (Belmore & Hubbard,ġ987). Because we desire to conserve our energy, we are more likely to pay more attention to the information that comes first and less likely to attend to information that comes One reason is that humans areĬognitive misers. For example, de Bruin (2005)įound that in competitions such as the Eurovision Song Contest and ice skating, higher marks were given to competitors who performed last.Ĭonsidering the primacy effect in terms of the cognitive processes central to human information processing leads us to understand why it can be so powerful. Recency effects, in which information that comes later is given more weight, although much less common than primacy effects, may sometimes occur. In some cases, the information that comes last can be most influential. This is not to say that it is always good to be first. Listed first on the ballot was elected more than 70% of the time, and Miller and Krosnick (1998) found similar effects for candidate preferences in laboratory studies. For instance, Koppell and Steen (2004) found that in elections in New York City, the candidate who was Primacy effects also show up in other domains, even in those that seem really important. Test but got more wrong near the end, she was seen as more intelligent than when she got the same number correct but got more correct at the end of the test. However, when the woman got most of her correct answers in the beginning of the In each video, the woman correctly answered the same number of questions and got the same number wrong. Similar findings were found by Edward Jones (1968), who had participants watch one of two videotapes of a woman taking an intelligence Second list, in which the negative traits came first. Rather, Asch found that the participants who heard the first list, in which the positive traits came first, formed much more favorable impressions than did those who heard the
You may have noticed something interesting about these two lists-they contain exactly the same traits but in reverse order.Īsch discovered something interesting in his study: because the traits were the same, we might have expected that both groups would form the same impression of the person, but this was not atĪll the case. Envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, intelligent.
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