Psychologists Debunk Common Myth About First Impressions

First impressions can be made in less than a second. In the blink of an eye, people gauge your trustworthiness, attractiveness and overall status. However, often these first impressions aren't accurate.

When it comes to assessing personality, we often use a person's attractiveness to draw (often unfair) conclusions. For example, we subconsciously assume that attractive people are sociable but vain. But what if we got that person totally wrong? Will they ever be able to shake that first impression? According to psychologists, yes.

"We know that the attractiveness of individuals generally leads to a myriad of stereotypical attributions," Marine Rougier, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at the Louvain Social Psychology Lab at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, said in a statement. "We also know that these attributions can influence real-life behaviors. For instance, attractive people generally receive a more positive treatment than less attractive individuals."

In scientific circles, this is known as the halo effect, and it describes the tendency of people to rate attractive individuals more favorably for personality traits and characteristics.

However, in a world of online dating and video conferencing, our first impressions of people often take place over the internet. And, thanks to filters, AI and good lighting, it is easy to manipulate your appearance for these first-time encounters. "Hence, it is important to determine whether these attributions can be influenced," Rougier said.

"We were interested particularly in whether these attributions can be changed when the attractiveness of a person is updated—for instance, when a person you thought was attractive is in fact less attractive than he or she initially seemed."

In a recent study, published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Rougier and co-author Jan De Houwer conducted a series of experiments to investigate how our first impressions can be updated or reversed based on new information.

In their first experiment, 360 participants were shown photographs of faces with varying levels of objective attractiveness. They were initially asked to form impressions of the people in these photos. However, after their first impressions were made, the participants were informed that the photos might have been altered, either to make the subjects seem more attractive or less attractive.

This did not significantly affect the participant's initial first impressions. So, for the second experiment, the researchers showed the participants examples of how attractiveness could easily be enhanced or reduced using photo-editing software. They then repeated the same experiment, this time with 401 participants and using only female faces. And, after learning about photo manipulation, the participants were much more likely to change their first impressions of the individuals in the photographs after being told that they might be manipulated.

The team describe this as a "halo-update effect." And similar results were seen in a third experiment, where participants were asked to form impressions of attractiveness and personality traits before and after being told that the photos may have been edited.

"We observed that updating the attractiveness of a person (e.g., saying that a person is less attractive than he or she seemed to be on a picture) can change the myriad of stereotypical attributions people made," Rougier told psychology and neuroscience news website PsyPost.

"For instance, if the attractive person was initially perceived as highly vain and sociable, then he or she will be perceived as low on these two attributes after being informed that the person is in fact not attractive. This illustrates that stereotypical attributions are malleable and can be changed when the source of these attributions is updated."

More research needs to be done to assess how these impressions continue to evolve over time, and how the halo-update effect can influence real-life behaviors. But the good news is that, if you aren't great at first impressions, there is still room to change people's minds. And also don't use highly edited photos on dating apps.