Description

First impressions are incredibly important and often are made very quickly.  But should we trust them?  Are they reliable guides?  Can we really predict what someone would do or is like after meeting someone once?  Psychologists have done a lot of research on how people make first impressions, how reliable these biases are, and how we change these beliefs.  For instance, we’re heavily biased against negative behavior and behaviors that we see as rare.

Discussion Questions

• Why are we biased against negative behaviors and rare events?
• How much should we trust first impressions?  Or does it matter what kind of impressions we got?
• How important are second impressions?  Tenth impressions?
• How can we make sure that we’re getting the right impression of a person before we make any judgments about them or predictions about what they’ll do

Keywords: biases, life skills, relationships, stereotypes