Do First Impressions Really Matter?

A new study on attractiveness questions the influence of first impressions.

Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.

Key points

• Research shows that people can form stable impressions from a face in a fraction of a second.
• A new study asks how much these first impressions matter when judging a person's overall attractiveness.
• Although participants were influenced by first impressions, the effect was very small.
• The findings suggests that first impressions may not matter as much as we think.

We can form a first impression of someone in a fraction of a second.

Janice Willis and Alexander Todorov demonstrated this in a famous study from 2006. They presented participants with faces for variable durations of time and asked them to rate the faces on several qualities: trustworthiness, competence, likeability, aggressiveness, and attractiveness. The striking finding was that people's ratings of individual faces were extremely consistent over time, whether faces were shown for one full second, half a second, or even a tenth of a second. However, there were also general trends over time: longer presentations of faces generally led to lower ratings across all of these qualities. In particular, attractiveness ratings decreased substantially between faces shown for one tenth of a second and faces shown for half a second, but then remained consistent at a full second.

The Influence of First Impressions

Although this study shows that first impressions can be formed remarkably quickly, it is not clear how robust these first impressions are when people are shown different images of the same person. A 2018 study by Juergen Goller and colleagues set out to address this question. The researchers gathered six different pictures (varying in lighting, pose, etc.) of 28 different individuals and had them rated for attractiveness by a group of participants. The attractiveness ratings were reported on a Likert scale from 1 (not attractive) to 7 (very attractive). Based on the average ratings across participants, the researchers sorted the six images of each identity based on their attractiveness.

Then, a new group of participants was asked to rate all the faces again, but some of the identities were presented in ascending order of attractiveness, and the other identities were presented in descending order. When comparing ratings across conditions, the researchers found that faces that were presented in descending order (from most attractive to least attractive) were consistently rated as more attractive than faces presented in ascending order of attractiveness. This result suggests that participants were more influenced by the earlier images they saw, supporting the view that first impressions really do matter.

Comparing Individual and Overall Ratings

However, a new study by Robin Kramer and colleagues published in Perception identified a potential flaw in Goller and colleagues' study. In that study, the results were based on participants' individual ratings of face images that may have been influenced by participants anchoring their responses to the previous trial. The new study by Kramer and colleagues addressed this issue by replicating the basic experimental design but only asking participants to provide a single overall rating of each person’s attractiveness after having viewed the six images (and in the absence of any particular image during the overall rating).

Their results partially confirmed those of Goller and colleagues. People whose face images were presented in descending order of attractiveness received overall higher attractiveness ratings than people whose face images were presented in ascending order (again, suggesting an effect of first impressions). However, although this result was significant and reliable across most of the face identities, it was quite small, amounting to just 0.22 points on the 7-point attractiveness rating scale. Moreover, in a follow-up study where faces were presented in a random order, the researchers found no evidence that the early images had a larger influence on overall ratings than later images.

Therefore, Kramer and colleagues conclude that first impressions based on face images matter, but not that much. This suggests that any real-life implications of these anchoring effects may be more limited than was once thought. A poor first impression may slightly bias someone's opinion, but chances are the bias will be small and relatively easy to overcome.