Can we Undo our First Impressions?

Imagine that you learn something highly negative about someone new. For instance, say, an up and coming politician is accused of corruption, or a new faculty member is rumored to have sexually harassed studentsFurther, imagine that you find out later that you were entirely wrong. Perhaps the politician’s opponents planted evidence, or the rumors about the faculty member were soundly discredited. In scenarios like these, can we fully cast aside our false first impressions, or might they persist at some level even after we explicitly believe that we have changed our minds? Popular wisdom tells us, after all, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.” If it is the case that first impressions “stick” even when new facts come to light, it is easy to understand why they are often considered to be so important.

 

 

Research in social psychology would seem to agree that, in fact, it is difficult to fully “undo” a false first impression. Experiments using implicit measures – those that assess spontaneous, unintentional reactions to stimuli, rather than asking research participants to express an opinion of those stimuli – have often found that photographs of people continue to elicit implicit reactions consistent with an initial impression, even after participants no longer explicitly believe it. For example, in one line of studies, participants formed impressions of two groups based on a story in which one group coldly massacres the other, and formed implicit and explicit evaluations consistent with what they learned (Gregg, Seibt, & Banaji, 2006). Subsequently, they were told that the groups had been labeled incorrectly due to experimenter error, and should be reversed. This revelation prompted participants to immediately flip their explicit judgments of liking of the two groups. However, their implicit reactions to the two groups were largely unmoved: they continued to have more positive reactions to the initially positive group than to the initially negative group. These and other findings have been interpreted to mean that the process of rejecting a prior impression does not actually erase the memory of that impression or make it less likely to be spontaneously triggered; rather, it primarily affects whether we choose to deliberately express it. Considering that implicit reactions predict behavior in unique and important ways, this suggests that our first impressions may continue to influence and guide us, even after we have explicitly rejected them.

 

 

 

Luckily, some research suggests that although deciding that a first impression was false (e.g., “that rumor about the new faculty member was not true!”) may not be enough by itself to budge implicit reactions, learning new information about a person can shift them. Even if the earlier impression is not deleted from memory, a new impression might become strong enough to overshadow it, even in our implicit reactions. As we accumulate many new details about a person that contradicts our earlier impression, implicit evaluations do eventually drift to fall in line with those new revelations (e.g., Rydell & McConnell, 2006). And, more recent findings by Cone and Ferguson (2015) show that sometimes all it takes is a single new piece of information. When a new piece of information is extremely negative (and therefore especially diagnostic), it can overturn even a well-established positive first impression. In this recent research, participants’ beliefs about how diagnostic the new information was about the person predicted implicit change.