First impression: The Big Bang of the Universe-Relation

Column “PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTIONS” by Diego Ingrassia – “FIRST IMPRESSION: THE BIG BANG OF THE UNIVERSE-RELATION”
for PSICOLOGY CONTEMPORARY – The Beginning -n. 265, January-February 2018 – GIUNTI EDITORE

The word ‘beginning’ originates from the Latin word ‘initium’: from ‘to go into, to enter’.
Even today, the expression ‘to enter into a relationship’ is still quite normal: the beginning of a new relationship coincides, therefore, with the entry into a ‘new dimension’, a phase of inevitable perturbation and change, characteristic of every cognitive preliminary that accompanies the establishment of a new relationship.
It is a very compressed event in temporal order (a few fractions of a second) and not very conscious, normally referred to as the ‘first impression’, but at the same time we are faced with an extraordinary laboratory regarding the world of relationships, which together we will try to investigate and understand.

We know that this process of rapid evaluation, ‘by the skin’, can be crucial and trigger likes and dislikes, openness and availability, or closures and prejudices.
But before delving into the set of feelings, emotions and consequent assumptions that each of us makes about the other and the social repercussions of all this, it is important to dwell on the biological dimension underlying the phenomenon.
This automatic process of evaluation is an important inheritance of our evolution.
The animal that lives in the forest has a few tenths of a second to understand whether the person it encounters is a ‘friend’ or an ‘enemy’, and in function of this very rapid assessment it decides how to organise its behaviour – flight, attack or substantial indifference – and its survival depends on it.
It is evident that as far as we human beings are concerned, apart from particular and rare situations of serious threat and danger where our survival is at stake, this mechanism may seem completely useless or in any case oversized, yet this ‘software package’ put in place to safeguard our borders is still perfectly active and also fulfils other important functions.
The automatic adaptive process is able to save us mental energy. Indeed, if we were to store the tens of thousands of sensory information we perceive, our brain would soon go into black-out.
Therefore, in an automatic way, our central nervous system ‘chooses for us’ only the things it considers essential based on previous experience.
Clearly, while this ‘filtering’ mechanism allows us to speed up processes and save energy, it also imposes a qualitative limit on the evaluation process underway. Each one of us, unless we have solid motivations that induce us to step out of our comfort zone, seeks security in interpersonal relationships or at least the lowest threshold of discomfort, applying mental shortcuts to understand and classify things or people, and it is evident that these shortcuts are inevitably exposed to the development of stereotypes and prejudices.

But let us see what happens and how we can intervene if we decide to try to circumvent these mechanisms.
The first risk we run is that from first impressions we jump to conclusions without considering alternative hypotheses.
In this sense, many of the theories in circulation that are based on a purely inductive approach do not help us either.
The philosopher David Hume himself, in his Treatise on Human Nature, argued that the mere observation of a black crow cannot confirm the theory that all crows are black.
Phrases such as ‘I saw that he was angry’, ‘He got nervous, eh, when you asked him that question!’, ‘He is a very shy person’, in their simplicity represent this concept very well. These labels to categorise the other based on first impressions risk heavily conditioning the evaluation even when our professional role would require a more objective and articulate process of analysis.
Therefore, it is good to consider that, starting from private situations involving the most intimate relationships, to the role of the professional called upon to manage evaluation-type processes, no one is ever exempt from bias: shortcuts to quickly categorise information and save mental energy.

Can working as a team eliminate these errors? Not always. Not least because the opinions of others can bias our own judgements.
When we refer to ‘contextual bias’ and ‘observer expectation’, we define a set of phenomena related to the suggestibility of observers with respect to personal prejudices or extra information, received from third parties, that influence their objective assessment.
A simple example of this phenomenon is the self-confirmation bias, the tendency to look (voluntarily or unconsciously) only for evidence that confirms our initial belief, ignoring objective evidence that could disconfirm it (tendency to judge information that supports one’s beliefs as more important than information that goes against what one wants to prove).
In a study by Hill et al. (2008), it was shown how much this impacted on jurors called upon to make a decision of guilt or innocence, when they were either made to doubt that the suspect was a recidivist liar; or were reassured about the sincerity and accuracy of the witness.
Eliminating bias is therefore extremely complex. Nevertheless, we can build more awareness to manage our thoughts and emotions.
The difference between those who use a rigorous methodology of investigation and those who rely on instinct is in fact summed up by whether or not they are aware of their recurring errors of judgement: the expert knows where he can be misled, he knows himself, and he relies on tools that avoid making him jump to conclusions quickly.
He collects data, tests different hypotheses for each verbal or non-verbal data he collects, and only then makes his final assessment.
A well known phrase by Oscar Wilde, ‘There is never a second chance to make a good first impression’, takes us back to that initial moment, which we have discussed at length, leaving us seemingly hopeless.
In reality, we have seen that with the right method it is possible to bring our awareness to where the strategy of evolution had preferred to rely on the speed and safety of an automatic mechanism.
Developing emotional competence means being aware of what produces our behavioural reactions and knowing how to intervene to direct them constructively towards our interlocutor.