First Impressions
First Impressions

I come to write this today off the back of a client review session, where although I’m changing the phrasing, I was told I’d been written off before I’d even been met by said client. This was less to do with my abilities, the counselling setting or anything to do with how I’d introduced myself to the client months ago- it had everything to do with how they felt about themselves prior to meeting with me. Again, changing the phrasing- they felt they were too complex to be cured. Professionals had both succeeded and failed in the past with them but ‘x’ amount of sessions ago they felt helpless and that coloured how they felt about being helped and improvement felt miles away and almost impossible.

I think in a past life a comment like that would have gotten to me, perhaps eaten away a little at me but my filter has changed and so has the client’s, through working hard, challenging held concepts and actioning change.

In this example, the first impression wasn’t even based on meeting me, it was based upon past experience of therapists, knowing they were seeing a counsellor paid for by the Primary Care Network and perceiving it as short-term when in fact they needed medium-term care. I was combating personal and social stereotypes without even knowing it and before therapy had even commenced.

Look at the picture for this blog, what do you see first; look again, can you see the full picture? Does it take a few goes to see what’s going on?

Social psychology suggests that the split-second assumptions we make are usually based on traits exhibited, facial expressions, how a person dresses, language and speech and if values or morals have been conveyed, alongside general emotional state and stereotypes. We presume that these are stable characteristics and we judge if we can converse, tolerate, date, or work for this person based on often fleeting encounters and information.

Staying with the employment aspect, research has shown that interviewers who gel immediately with candidates revert to selling them the job rather than information gathering about the candidate- it becomes a positive bias that the candidate is perfect for the job if they have managed to create a good first impression. Questions asked are questions that are designed to confirm the assumptions the interviewer has made about the candidate (Dougherty, Ebert, & Callender, 1986; Dougherty, Turban, & Callender, 1994; Snyder & Swann, 1978). That said, research has found that if a good, strong first impression has been made but the candidate then fails to continue as expected, then the interviewer can fail to adjust their impressions as the interview progresses; hence why scripted interview questionnaires are now common place and scored by aggregate with more than one person present, to help eliminate bias and employers becoming blind sighted (Nordstrom, Hall, & Bartels, 1998).

In daily life, we may have friends that when we first met them, they personified kindness, caring, nurturing and had your best interests at heart, but over time they presented with traits, opinions and actions that progressively didn’t fit that first impression any longer. It can be very difficult to admit that we were wrong in our analysis of someone and also that their behaviour does not fit with how we expect them to behave. Somewhere along the way we’ve missed the cues or chose to ignore them in order to hold that image dear, despite the pain the friendship now causes. We don’t like being wrong.

The crux of this is about us daily engaging with people for the first time and assimilating potentially faulty information from our interactions. This is why it is important to not draw dramatic and impenetrable conclusions from first meetings- yes the information you receive may well be important and there is a lot to be said about gut-instinct on situations and people, however we may well fall foul of by-passing useful, worthy people or empowering situations if we don’t bother to check the evidence out before making crucial decisions. Similarly, we can hold on to toxic people and toxic situations by also not making healthy challenges about their behaviour and engaging with how they make us feel.

  • Are you operating to a pattern of positive or negative bias?
  • Are you attracted to particular personalities to work with or date?
  • How have these situations panned out for you and did you evidence-check along the way?
  • Did you judge people too harshly or not enough, based on the evidence?

Opening yourself up to holding less rigid opinions and first impressions makes taking into account new incoming and contradictory information much easier to handle; you can get used to moulding opinions and assumptions by increasing your awareness of how those people/ situations make you feel and by gathering both confirming and opposing information to make balanced decisions. In sum, if you remain open then being ‘wrong’ becomes easier to handle, because the original assumption didn’t become a fixed belief, it was a loosely held assumption, with plasticity; a hypothesis that was being tested.

Further reading: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/studying-first-impressions-what-to-consider

and https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/basics/first-impressions

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