The psychology of first impressions - digested

Piercings convey low intelligence and greater creativity, according to researchYou’ll have had this experience - you meet a new person and within moments you feel good or bad vibes about them. This is you performing “thin slicing” - deducing information about a person based on “tells”, some more obvious than others.Psychologists have studied this process in detail. For example, they’ve shown that we form a sense of whether a stranger is trustworthy in less than one tenth of a second. With some accuracy, we can also deduce rapidly more specific information such as their intelligence and sexual orientation.This post delves into our archive and beyond to digest the science of first impressions:People who make more eye contact are perceived as more intelligentPsychologists at Northeastern University asked participants to watch five-minute videos of strangers chatting to each other in pairs, and then to rate the strangers' intelligence. People in the videos who made more eye contact with their conversational partner, especially while talking, and to a lesser extent while listening, tended to be perceived as more intelligent. Other research has found that people who avoid eye contact are judged to be insincere and lacking in conscientiousness (this last result was found for women, but not men). Don't go too far with the eye contact though - if you lock on and don't let go, people will likely assume you're psychopathic. Men with brown eyes are perceived as...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs