First Impressions

By Janine Willis, Alexander Todorov. Science, 2005

1,207 citations recorded by the source corpus.

People often draw trait inferences from the facial appearance of other people. We investigated the minimal conditions under which people make such inferences. In five experiments, each focusing on a specific trait judgment, we manipulated the exposure time of unfamiliar faces. Judgments made after a 100-ms exposure correlated highly with judgments made in the absence of time constraints, suggesting that this exposure time was sufficient for participants to form an impression. In fact, for all judgments—attractiveness, likeability, trustworthiness, competence, and aggressiveness—increased exposure time did not significantly increase the correlations. When exposure time increased from 100 to 500 ms, participants' judgments became more negative, response times for judgments decreased, and confidence in judgments increased. When exposure time increased from 500 to 1,000 ms, trait judgments and response times did not change significantly (with one exception), but confidence increased for some of the judgments; this result suggests that additional time may simply boost confidence in judgments. However, increased exposure time led to more differentiated person impressions.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4a24950dda97c25f81ae0d372dd264acb516eaad

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

First Impressions From Faces Among U.S. and Culturally Isolated Tsimane’ People in the Bolivian Rainforest (2012, background): “…by systematic research evidence documenting rapid and consensual first impressions from faces (Bar, Neta, & Linz, 2006; Rule & Ambady, 2008; Willis & Todorov, 2006) as well as sensitivity to variations in facial attractiveness and babyfaceness in young infants (Kramer, Zebrowitz, San…”
Why your stigma isn't hired : a dual-process framework of interview bias (2016, background): “The speed with which impressions are formed suggests that this process relies on existing heuristics and thus on automatic Type 1 processes (Bar, Neta, & Linz, 2006; Willis & Todorov, 2006).”
Interpreting CNN Models for Apparent Personality Trait Regression (2017, background): “Similarly, we know that humans infer personality traits in a few milliseconds [21], but the attention mechanisms that drive these decisions remain still unidentified.”
The Faces of Success: Beauty and Ugliness Premiums in e-Commerce Platforms (2020, background): “We form first impressions of others and make judgments about their social traits almost instantaneously on the basis of face perceptions (Samper, Yang, and Daniels 2018; Todorov et al. 2005; Willis and Todorov 2006).”
The Caucasian and North African French Faces (CaNAFF): A Face Database (2018, background): “It is now well established that faces provide a lot of information for making assumptions about people and their characteristics (e.g. Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008; Willis & Todorov, 2006).”
A Survey on perceived speaker traits: Personality, likability, pathology, and the first challenge (2015, background): “…scenario, this valence information can only be prospective and is likely to be based on vocal stereotypes and attributional information available (Ambady and Skowronski, 2008; Kreiman and Van Lancker Sidtis, 2011), e. g. a friendly tone or benevolent character as potential signal for reciprocal…”
Social attributions from faces: determinants, consequences, accuracy, and functional significance. (2015, background): “Willis & Todorov (2006) presented participants with unfamiliar faces for 100, 500, or 1,000 milliseconds and asked for their impressions of the targets on various trait dimensions, such as trustworthiness and aggressiveness.”
Facebook Profiles Reflect Actual Personality, Not Self-Idealization (2010, neutral): “…personal information that mirror those found in personal environments, private thoughts, facial images, and social behavior, all of which are known to contain valid information about personality (Ambady & Skowronski, 2008; Funder, 1999; Hall & Bernieri, 2001; Kenny, 1994; Vazire & Gosling, 2004).”