Five new rules of first impressions

First impressions have long been a mainstay of psychological research. In the past, much of the focus has been on how particular facial features influence our perceptions of how dominant others are, for example, or how trustworthy they appear to be. 

But, as they tend to do, researchers are now digging deeper, exploring everything from which of our initial judgements are actually right to whether being snap-judged accurately is necessarily a good thing. To explore some of these new insights, we present our guide to five new rules of first impressions:

1. Facial first impressions are often wrong

In any given study, participants tend to rate the same faces as being more or less trustworthy, or dominant, or pleasant. This consistency might seem to suggest that we really are picking up on something about another person's personality from their face. Not so, according to work from Princeton University's Alexander Todorov and colleagues. 

In work published in Nature Human Behaviour, they reveal that we tend to prefer faces that are closest to our own conception of what a typical face looks like. Not only that, but we feel more positively about people with such faces. So, though your face-based snap judgment might match a friend's, you're both likely to have gotten the wrong first impression.

2. 'Like yourself, and others will follow'

So reads the title of a 2024 paper which found that an individual's level of self-esteem affected other people's first impressions of their personalities. Lauren Gazzard Kerr and Lauren Human studied two groups: 378 strangers who took part in a speed-dating event, and just over 300 people who participated in platonic getting-to-know-you sessions. 

All of these participants first completed general personality questionnaires and a measure of their self-esteem. Then, after each meeting, they reported on how much they liked - or were romantically interested in - the other person, and rated what they perceived their personality to be. 

In the speed-dating group, the team found that the personalities of those with higher self-esteem were judged more accurately, though this didn't affect how much others liked them. However, when people accurately perceived the personality of someone with low self-esteem, whether in a romantic or platonic setting, they liked them less. In the platonic group, people perceived those with higher self-esteem more accurately and liked them more. 

Though it may sound harsh, this work suggests that for people with low self-esteem, being perceived accurately in a romantic context might be unhelpful – assuming that their goal is to be liked. For these people, accurate first impressions may, as the researchers put it, 'reveal too much, too soon'.

3. Unhappier people are harder to read

In their drive to explore what it is that makes some people open books, while others are harder to read, Lauren Gazzard Kerr and Lauren Human explored whether differences in wellbeing might matter, too. This experiment involved a speed-dating study in which 372 participants took part in a total of more than 4,700 individual dates. All had first completed a personality questionnaire and reported on their general wellbeing. 

After each meeting, they rated their partner's personality. The researchers found that, overall, the speed-daters' first impressions of each other's personalities weren't very accurate. That said, some individuals were consistently judged more accurately – those with higher self-reported wellbeing scores. Overall, these people were easier to read, the team concluded, with less happy people being trickier to judge – though further work will have to explore exactly why this might be. 

4. We're bad at knowing if we've made a good first impression

One of the most uplifting findings in the field of first impressions comes from well-publicised studies of both adults and children, which concluded that after a first meeting, other people tend to like us more than we think. A 2024 paper from Eva Bleckmann at the University of Hamburg and colleagues, though, set out to find why some people are more likely than others to expect to be liked – and to explore how these perceptions of being liked (or not) change during the course of a first meeting. 

The team studied almost 300 adolescents, all of whom completed personality questionnaires before talking to each other for the first time. During these 60 to 90-minute meetings, they repeatedly rated how much they thought the others liked them. Before the meeting started, those who scored higher in extraversion and self-esteem and lower in neuroticism were most confident that they would be liked. 

These three factors had the same influence on their perceptions of their like-ability at the end of the first phase of the meeting, during which they introduced themselves, From this point on, though, personality characteristics stopped playing a role. Instead, other factors – presumably, the responses of the other kids – had a bigger impact on changes in these perceptions.

5. First impressions online aren't necessarily any worse

These days, most of us are familiar with meeting people for the first time in a video call, rather than in person. Given that these meetings are often business-related, researchers have been very curious about how such online settings might affect first impressions, and so potentially affect workplace collaborations or even success in job interviews.

Work published in 2023 by a Durham University team led by Abi Cook found that what our background looks like matters. Ratings collected during a series of Zoom meetings revealed people who had plants or a bookcase in the background were rated as being more trustworthy and more competent than people with a living room or a 'comedic' background. 

This study also found that women participating in video calls were consistently viewed as being more trustworthy and competent than men, regardless of their background – and, for men and women, smiling boosted these ratings.

One common concern about online meetings is, though, that it can seem harder to judge a person's personality via a screen. However, this concern was not supported by the findings of a 2024 study led by Marie-Catherine Mignault at Cornell University. In this work, the team found that overall, participants were able to perceive each other's unique personality just as well on Zoom as in person – and that they liked each other just as well. 

Overall, the breadth of this research certainly shows that the field of first impressions is still going strong. And as researchers dig deeper, new questions are emerging. These might be five new rules of first impressions – but they certainly won't be the last.