In everyday life, change meetings with with nameless faces are a certainty.Even our parents, to them when we were born we were strangers and though we dont remeber it they were stangers to us. classmates, friends, pratically anyone with which one has any relationship with, were no more than stangers before a cautious glance is given and we say hello. .
from the first instance instictivley our attention is drawn to their face, is it happy or sad? what is with his hair color? hey he's kind of cute.must have a girl friend already, wait hes kind of fat around the waist.must be a lazy slob. Our brains will try to find any clues, signals that will help us identify as many characteristcis as we can. By analysing and assimilating various things such as the persons gender, age, physical characteristics, tone of voice even they way they stand along with our own preconceptions and ideas a picture is made in the mind. First impressions last. That picture we have created of that person is our first impression of them and it will continue to color they way in which they are perceived in us.
'you cant judge a book by its cover' is a common expression and may be true to some extent, but when i read a book called tales of countless killings i know that at least one person will die. That said however it is a common experience for many, myself included, that our first impressions about someone fall short of what they are actually like. So the question remains how much can we accuratley learn about other people form the first impression? Well that would largly depend on how accurate first impressions are.
Intuativly it would appear that the way in which people are seen gives enough for first impressions. In an experiment, performed by Sandford Dornbusch and his collegues (1965), children ages nine to eleven attending summer camp were paired up and each asked to give an opinion of another child. This opinion would be the basis of their first impressions.
