You Have Gained 1 Experience Point in “First Impressions 101”.
Biased Assessment of First Impressions
You are in a real-life RPG game. Your initial standing in the big five traits system at birth are your base statistics. As you gain life experiences, you gain and lose experience points in several fields of your life and your “big five” standing alters accordingly. For instance, each year of successful studies adds 1 experience point in your “knowledge” field and this increases your openness to experience and conscientiousness standing. Certain types of experiences are specific to a particular field of your personality while others have impact upon several fields. For example, staying in a healthy relationship can increase agreeableness but choosing to stay in an unhealthy relationship can increase neuroticism and decrease agreeableness.
As your statistics rely on the accumulation of all your real-life experiences, they will be much more valid than a standard big five traits test. If you have access to everyone’ statistics but not their actual experiences, can you confidently tell who would be a good friend an who wouldn’t?
I don’t know about you, but even with this level of precision, I can’t. There is just so many variables that could lead to the same standing. I don’t know enough to judge.
I can’t help but notice that in reality, we are assessing others and being assessed by others in a similar way as well. We are taking personality tests everyday as we interact. The results of those almost instant personality assessments are the so-called “first impressions”. In life, we use reference points to make predictions. In the same fashion, when you meet someone, you focus on the traits that are more salient to you and this first impression becomes an “anchor” on which you base your subsequent analysis about the person. However, this “anchor” is influenced by factors that should be left out of our criterion during this first assessment. According to a study by Timothy Judge in 2004, for every inch taller in height, men earn up to 789$ more a year in salary because they are seen as more confident, strong and powerful. In a similar logic, attractive people also have wages that are higher than normal, because they are seen as more competent than the rest. In addition, people also tend to use case based information to assess their own behavior and use base-rate information to assess others’ behavior. If a person accidentally pushed past you in the metro, you may be inclined to conclude that this person is generally rude. Yet, if you were the one pushing through, you’d be much more lenient toward yourself because you were in a hurry that specific day. That being said, our first impressions aren’t quite as accurate as we assume they are.
Even in the fictional scenario above which provides a relatively objective “first impressions” measure, we can’t be entirely sure about our predictions about others. If that’s the case, why would the much more subjective first impressions in real life be considered good enough make or break our careers and social relationships? In the end, aren’t we judging others and being judged by others blindly according to the results from a “personality test” that’s neither reliable nor valid?
Student ID: 260636987
Reference:
Judge, T. A., & Cable, D. M. (2004). The Effect of Physical Height on Workplace Success and Income: Preliminary Test of a Theoretical Model.Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(3), 428–441.
