first impressions

by teejay 5 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  teejay

  When we meet someone for the first time, we notice a number of things about them--clothes, gestures, manner of speaking, tone of voice, appearance, and so on. We then draw on these cues to fit the person into a ready-made category. No matter how little information we have or how contradictory it is, no matter how many times in the past our initial impressions of people have been wrong, we still classify and categorize people after meeting them only briefly.

  Associated with each category is a schema, a set of beliefs or expectations about something (in this case people) based on past experience and that is presumed to apply to all members of that category. For example, if we see a woman wearing a white coat who also has a stethoscope around her neck, we might reasonably categorize her as a doctor. Further, we might conclude that she is a highly trained professional, knowledgeable about diseases and their cures, qualified to prescribe medication and so forth. These various conclusions follow from most people's schema of a doctor.

  Schemata serve a number of important functions. For one thing, they allow us to make inferences about other people. We assume, for example, that a friendly person is likely to be good-natured, to accept a social invitation from us, or to do us a small favor. We may not know these things for sure, but our schema for friendly person leads us to make this inference.

  Schemata play a crucial role in how we interpret and remember information. For example, in one sturdy, some subjects were told that they would be receiving information about friendly, sociable men, whereas other subjects were informed that they would be learning about intellectual men. Both groups were then given the same information about a set of 50 men and asked to say how many of the men were friendly and how many were intellectual. The subjects who had expected to hear about friendly men dramatically overestimated the number of friendly men in the set, and those who had expected to hear about intellectual men vastly overestimated the number of intellectual men in the set. Moreover, each group of subjects forgot many of the details they received about the men that were inconsistent with their expectations. In short, the subjects tended to hear and remember what they expected to.

  From Psychology - an Introduction by Charles Morris with Albert Maisto, Prentice Hall, 1999

  more to come...
• 

  Free2Bme

  Hi,
  Sorry to lower the tone but it rather reminds me of the experience of the people living in the Big Brother house on TV.
  One point that stands out is how they all make judgements about their housemates in the first few hours that sometimes take weeks to shake off.
  The weeks pass by and it's great how they draw closer and really suss eachother out. Annoying habits may still be ...well, annoying...but their interactions become more accepting, like a family.
  We really do decide far too much by first impressions. So many folks find it hard to just be thmselves, especially shy people who can be abrasive and seem cold.
  Personally I find people respond to me negatively because I am overweight. They patronise me, seem to assume I am jolly, not very bright and pretty slow and lazy. It makes my blood boil. Unfortunately it also puts me on the defensive which prevents them accessing my real personality. Great fun at job interviews!!

  Interesting subject.

  Free
• 

  teejay

  Free,

  You're talking about a stereotype which is a special kind of schema, something that's also covered in the chapter. A stereotype is a set of characteristics thought to be shared by all members of a social category (see norm's The dim people thread). It is based on almost any distinguishing feature, including sex, race, occupation, physical appearance, place of residence, and membership in a group or organization. When our first impressions of people are governed by a stereotype, we tend to infer things about them solely on the basis of their social category and to ignore facts about individual traits that are inconsistent teeth the stereotype. As a result, we may "remember" things about them selectively or inaccurately, thereby perpetuating our initial stereotype.

  You said, "It makes my blood boil. Unfortunately it also puts me on the defensive which prevents them accessing my real personality. Great fun at job interviews!!" By being stereotyped, other's interaction with you is altered which, in turn, changes your reaction to them. In other words, the stereotype takes on a life of its own as the way you are perceived leads directly to THEIR behavior toward you, which, in turn, causes YOU to conform to the stereotype. It's a bad cycle, difficult (but not impossible) to stop, especially if you're aware of the phenomenon.

  I don't know how long you've been visiting JW.com, but we've seen this happen in the not-too-distant past. It's very interesting, and very common.

  peace,
  tj
• 

  larc

  teejay,

  Enjoying your Psych.? It sure is fun and interesting. Sure beats a Watchtower study.

  In an applied setting, it has been found that in a 30 minute job interview, the interviewer forms his evaluation in the first 2 minutes and rarely changes it there after. Of the available job selection methods, the interview is the most widely used, and one of the least reliable.
• 

  teejay

  Yes I am, larc. Very much.

  You make an interesting point concerning the lack of reliability of job interviews, and it's one of the reasons I was posting this. During his lecture the instructor took the time to point out that fact to the class. Most of the students are quite younger than me, of course, and the reality that an interviewer's judgment of them would impact whether or not they got the job will be very useful to them in years to come.

  I asked the instructor why the interview process was still such a valued tool of the hiring process, in view of the high likelihood for erroneous conclusions. He said something about federal laws, tradition, etc. Still, for the interviewee, it's something worth knowing.

  peace,
  tj
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  more:

  Schemata can also lure us into "remembering" things about people that we never actually observed. Most of us associate the traits of shyness, quietness, and preoccupation with one's own thoughts with the schema introvert. If we notice that Melissa is shy, we are likely to categorize her as an introvert. Later, we may "remember" that she also seemed preoccupied with her own thoughts. In other words, thinking of Melissa as an introvert saves us the trouble of taking into account all the subtle shadings of her personality. But this kind of thinking can easily lead to errors if we attribute to Melissa qualities that belong to the schema but not to her.

  Because other people are so important to us as actual or potential friends, colleagues, and intimate partners, we measure them against our schemata from the moment we meet them. Drawing on our general schemata, we quickly form a first impression. Over time, as we continue to interact with them, we add new information about them to our mental files. However, our later experiences with people generally do not influence us nearly so much as our earliest impressions. This has become known as the primacy effect, the theory that early information about someone weighs more heavily than later information in influencing one's impression of that person.

  More to come...
• 

  larc

  teejay,

  I would guess that your prof. is a Social Psychologist, not an I/O Psychologist, because federal law has nothing to do with it. In fact, the reason why interveiwers use it in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are not very good at it, has to do with the very subject you are talking about. Selective memory and forgetting is part of it. They conveniently remember cases where people they hired did well and forget more cases where people did not work out. As a result, they are confidence at something they are not good at.

  I don't know if you got to it yet, but a related subject that is equally fascinating is Attribution Theory.

  By the way, if you have to write a Psych. research paper sometime, let me know here or via e mail. I might have some ideas that could help you.