Second Impressions

My grandmother subscribed me to Reader’s Digest. Most weeks, I don’t even take it out of the plastic baggy before I launch it into the trash. It just screams, “Read me, you gullible guy you!” You know? Anyway, this week, I glanced at the cover as I was holding it above the garbage. It read, “10 Simple Keys to a Happy Life.” Well! Maybe this would be worth reading after all! (I figured there was a chance, albeit small, that one of the keys to happiness would be dumping my thesis and joining a hippie commune.) I tore off the plastic and turned to page 96.

The top 10 list for achieving happiness went like this: 1) Wealth; 2) Desire; 3) Intelligence; 4) Genetics... When it got to 5) Beauty, I gave up. Beauty? Oh, for Christ’s sake, I thought, now I’m screwed. I started flipping to other pages in the little magazine, and I happened upon an article titled, “Great First Impressions.” Most of the piece was thinly-veiled self-help tips, with subheadings like, “Making Every Second Count.” Some gems: When a woman meets a man, she knows within five minutes if she wants to sleep with him or not; attractive people are more likely to be promoted (damn those 10 secrets to happiness); and a firm handshake supposedly says a lot about a person’s personality. Towards the end, the author mentions a few psychologists that have done work in the field.

I looked up a few of the studies. In one, former Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences Nalini Ambady asked undergraduate test subjects to fill out CUE Guide questionnaires for several teaching fellows based on 10-second video clips filmed during actual section meetings. To an astonishing degree of accuracy, the subjects’ scores matched those that the TFs actually got from their real students at the end of a semester. Apparently, it takes real students very little time—seconds, really—to form long-lasting and detailed judgments about their teachers. Psychologists argue that the same goes for us all: We make rapid judgments about everyone we meet based on nonverbal cues, physical appearance and gestures. These first impressions are emotional, irrational reactions that quickly concretize into permanent opinions. Maybe our initial judgments stick because they really are accurate and continue to reflect the other people’s personalities long after we’ve met them. Maybe eons ago, natural selection favored the ability to make perfunctory and permanent character judgments. But more likely our impressions stick because they just make life easier. They act like cognitive shortcuts—interpretive frames that we can use to account for all of someone’s subsequent actions.

Let’s do our own little psychology experiment. We walk through the Square every day, right? Imagine it in your mind. You’ve got Leavitt & Peirce, ABP, a few banks. Across the street, there’s CVS and the Coop, the Curious George store and so on, right? Great. Now look up, above the ground level. What’s there? No idea, eh? Me neither. I had to go look for myself. Here’s what I found: three American flags flying on rooftop poles, a big analog clock mounted above Radio Shack, some fancy wrought iron balconies on the apartments above Toscanini’s and a sign announcing the law offices of Dewey, Cheatum and Howe on the windows above George the Curious. Who would’ve guessed? As pedestrians, I guess we’re only really concerned with the ground floor of any building, so we don’t bother to notice the rest.

Which is fine, except that I bet we do the same thing with other people. Believe me, I’ve got my own list for “tools,” “douchebags” and the like. (I even have a list of Anti-Chrises, the human particles I avoid completely, lest we annihilate each other in a weird anthropomorphic physics catastrophe.) Once you find your way on to my lists, it’s really hard to get off. What scares me is that everyone has lists like mine. How do I know that all those people in my sections aren’t looking at me for 10 seconds and then mentally declaring, “Wanker!” I want to say, “No, man, you got me all wrong. Really! I’m a nice guy!” It’s not that I care individually what other people think of me, it’s more the principle of the thing—that I only have 10 seconds to make a gestural/visual/vibe-y good impression, and then that’s it: I’ve been typecast. I mean, what if I have an off day?

Just yesterday, David Weinfeld wrote a little ditty about why it feels good to hate ‘that jerk in section’ and why it’s OK to foster fun, conspiratorial enmities. Maybe he’s right, and these minor maledicent habits are basically harmless. I guess when it comes down to it, hate doesn’t bother me. Intransigence does. Here’s where David and I part company. Forming and maintaining intractable opinions of other people—good or bad—doesn’t make life interesting; it makes it boring. I can’t help but think of all those modernist painters—cubists and the like—who got fed up with seeing the same things over and over again. Their crazy canvases force us see the objects of everyday existence as if they were completely alien and unknown. The idea is that our second impressions are even more interesting and exciting than the first ones.

It’s true: Without strong first impressions and healthy doses of interpersonal irrationality, life would be fairly lackluster. But living with stubbornly held opinions of others is like wearing super-dark glasses: It doesn’t just make life monotonous, it also turns us into nearly blind, narrow-minded people. I say, if it’s worth watching a good movie twice, it’s worth living off our second impressions.

Christopher W. Snyder ’04 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.