Power_ Why Some People Have Itand Others Don't - Jeffrey Pfeffer [65]
YOU GET ONLY ONE CHANCE TO MAKE A FIRST IMPRESSION
Social perception—how people form judgments of others, which is something we do continuously to successfully navigate the world—has been studied extensively. That research reveals several crucial facts relevant to your building a reputation that will help you create a power base.
First, people start forming impressions of you in the first few seconds or even milliseconds of contact. Impressions aren’t just based on extensive information about you, your behavior, and what you can do as manifested in job performance, but also on initial readings of your facial expression, posture, voice, and appearance. One study found that judgments of people made in the first 11 milliseconds correlated highly with judgments made when there were no time constraints, suggesting that extremely brief exposure was all that was required for people to form a reasonably stable impression.5 This result suggests that the material from chapter 7 on acting and speaking with power is really important, as how you first present yourself matters a great deal.
Second, and this may surprise you, these fast first impressions are remarkably accurate in predicting other more durable and important evaluations. Social psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal did a meta-analysis of the accuracy of predictions in many domains in clinical and social psychology. They found that short slices of behavior—less than five minutes—yielded accurate predictions, for instance, about assessments of people’s personality. Moreover, they found that predictions based on extremely small samples of behavior, less than half a minute, did not differ in their accuracy from impressions formed using longer, four-and five-minute snippets of behavior.6 In one empirical study using college teacher ratings as the outcome to be explained, Ambady and Rosenthal noted that ratings based on a silent video clip of the instructor lasting less than half a minute significantly predicted the course evaluations given by students at the end of the quarter. In a second study, again using an extremely short video clip, of high school teachers, ratings of these short silent videos significantly predicted the ratings given to the teachers by their principals.7
Not only are reputations and first impressions formed quickly, but they are durable. Research has identified several processes that account for the persistence of initial reputations or, phrased differently, the importance of the order in which information is presented. All three processes are plausible. We don’t need to know which is operating to worry about making a good first impression.
One process, attention decrement, argues that because of fatigue or boredom, people don’t pay as close attention to later information as they do to information that comes early, when they first form judgments. When you first meet people, you are going to be quite attentive to what they say and do as you seek to learn about them and sort and assign them to categories, including how helpful and powerful you think they are or could be. After a while, you will think you know them and stop paying as close attention to what they say and do. As you sit in a meeting, because you think you know what the other person is going to say, you stop paying attention to what they actually do say.
A second process entails cognitive discounting—once people have formed an impression of another, they disregard any information that is inconsistent with their initial ideas. This process is particularly likely when the decisions and judgments are consequential. Who wants to admit that we are wrong about something important,