Summary of Should you trust your first impression? - Peter Mende-Siedlecki
Research in social psychology suggests that people form lasting impressions of others based on their behaviors, inferring stable character traits from a single behavior.
People can accurately predict how others will behave in the future based on their impressions.
Learning negative, immoral information about someone typically has a stronger impact on impression updating than positive, moral information.
However, when learning about someone's abilities and competencies, positive information is weighted more heavily.
The brain responds to new information inconsistent with initial impressions by activating an extended network of brain regions associated with social cognition, attention, and cognitive control.
Activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal sulcus correlates with perceptions of how frequently certain behaviors occur in daily life.
The brain tracks low-level statistical properties of behavior to make complex decisions about other people's character.
The brain may care more about negative, immoral behaviors due to their comparative rarity, but good behaviors are more plentiful.
Ultimately, people tend to weigh less frequent behaviors more heavily when forming and updating impressions.
impression updating is influenced by whether behaviors are perceived as typical or out of the ordinary.
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Notable Quotes
— 00:41 — « Inferring stable character traits from a single behavior, like a harsh word or a clumsy step. »
— 00:46 — « Using our impressions as guides, we can accurately predict how people are going to behave in the future. »
— 01:49 — « Certain types of learning dont seem to lead to this sort of negativity bias. »
— 03:07 — « In other words, the brain seems to be tracking low-level, statistical properties of behavior in order to make complex decisions regarding other peoples character. »
— 03:39 — « Theres a good moral in this data: your brain, and by extension you, might care more about the very negative, immoral things another person has done compared to the very positive, moral things. »
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Science and Nature