What the Dog Saw [156]
This is why Hadi Partovi, Steve Ballmer, and I all agreed on Nolan Myers. Apparently, human beings don’t need to know someone in order to believe that they know someone. Nor does it make that much difference, apparently, that Partovi reached his conclusion after putting Myers through the wringer for an hour, I reached mine after ninety minutes of amiable conversation at Au Bon Pain, and Ballmer reached his after watching and listening as Myers asked a question.
Bernieri and Ambady believe that the power of first impressions suggests that human beings have a particular kind of prerational ability for making searching judgments about others. In Ambady’s teacher experiments, when she asked her observers to perform a potentially distracting cognitive task — like memorizing a set of numbers — while watching the tapes, their judgments of teacher effectiveness were unchanged. But when she instructed her observers to think hard about their ratings before they made them, their accuracy suffered substantially. Thinking only gets in the way. “The brain structures that are involved here are very primitive,” Ambady speculates. “All of these affective reactions are probably governed by the lower brain structures.” What we are picking up in that first instant would seem to be something quite basic about a person’s character, because what we conclude after two seconds is pretty much the same as what we conclude after twenty minutes or, indeed, an entire semester. “Maybe you can tell immediately whether someone is extroverted, or gauge the person’s ability to communicate,” Bernieri says. “Maybe these clues or cues are immediately accessible and apparent.” Bernieri and Ambady are talking about the existence of a powerful form of human intuition. In a way, that’s comforting, because it suggests that we can meet a perfect stranger and immediately pick up on something important about him. It means that I shouldn’t be concerned that I can’t explain why I like Nolan Myers, because, if such judgments are made without thinking, then surely they defy explanation.
But there’s a troubling suggestion here as well. I believe that Nolan Myers is an accomplished and likable person. But I have no idea from our brief encounter how honest he is, or whether he is self-centered, or whether he works best by himself or in a group, or any number of other fundamental traits. That people who simply see the handshake arrive at the same conclusions as people who conduct a full interview also implies, perhaps, that those initial impressions matter too much — that they color all the other impressions that we gather over time.
For example, I asked Myers if he felt nervous about the prospect of leaving school for the workplace, which seemed like a reasonable question, since I remember how anxious I was before my first job. Would the hours scare him? Oh no, he replied, he was already working between eighty and a hundred hours a week at school. “Are there things that you think you aren’t good at that, make you worry?” I continued.
His reply was sharp: “Are there things that I’m not good at, or things that I can’t learn? I think that’s the real question. There are a lot of things I don’t know anything about, but I feel comfortable that given the right environment and the right encouragement I can do well at.” In my notes, next to that reply, I wrote “Great answer!” and I can remember at the time feeling the little thrill you experience as an interviewer when someone’s behavior conforms with your expectations. Because I had decided, right off, that I liked him, what I heard in his answer was toughness and confidence. Had I decided early on that I didn’t like Nolan Myers, I would have heard in that reply arrogance and bluster. The first impression becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: we hear what we expect to hear. The interview is hopelessly biased in favor of the nice.
3.
When Ballmer and Partovi and I met Nolan Myers, we made a prediction. We looked at the way he behaved in our presence — at the way he talked and acted and seemed to think — and drew conclusions about