About First Encounters
First impression — is it important?
For me, it is. Why? Because I see first impression as how we shape our image for the first time to the audience.
Let’s just take a look when we enter a new room, whether it’s our new apartment, or even places we go to when holiday sort of like museum, water park, cinema, mall, etc. We see things that we have not seen before. And there is where we use our snap judgments; If we see the building is beautiful, then we say that the building is beautiful, if we don’t like the chair, then we will avoid the chair, etc. That is the analogy that I could say to describe how important first meeting that leads to first impression. If we see someone so smiley at first, then we will think they’re a friendly person. If our first encounter with someone felt very unpleasant, then we will think twice to meet them in the next chance.
As it mentioned by Peter Mende — Siedlecki, we are quick to form lasting impression of others based on their behaviors. Learning negative, highly immoral information about someone typically has a stronger impact than learning very positive highly moral information (immoral behaviors are more diagnostic). — That’s why there’s a word saying, “one stupid mistake can change everything”.
Then how is it possible?
This will be a scientific explanation but don’t worry I made it easy for you to understand. Let’s say that we attended to a concert and we saw someone (let’s just called him A) was littering and hit us. Ofc, we indeed perceived the behavior that was given as a specimen of immoral behavior. After that, we’re planning to go home but it was also raining that day & we didn’t bring umbrella. Suddenly, someone lend his umbrella to us. Surprisingly — it was A. We’re gonna think that A is a nice person IF he didn’t litter and it hit us.
The process came on behaviors that are perceived as being less frequent are also the ones that people tend to weigh more heavily. If lending an umbrella is something most of people won’t do, then there will be an updating impression towards A. But the fact is, many people would lend an umbrella to us and none would throw a trash to us. So in this case, A’s behavior at the concert which was littering is dominating our judgement on the first impression. This process happen caused by the FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging).
