To judge what kind of first impression we make is possible with the gift of "seeing ourselves as others see us"...something that can be beneficial in a job interview, during a sales pitch or on a first date. However, many still walk away from the situations with nothing more than a vague notion of how that first impression was perceived.
Now, psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis and Wake Forest University have tested people in first impression settings in the laboratory and have found that confidence makes all the difference in knowing whether you've hit a homerun or struck out.
The researchers engaged 280 students in opposite-sex pairings from both universities in five-minute conversation after which impressions (your rating of your partner's personality traits) and meta-perceptions (your rating of how you think your partner rated your personality traits) were recorded on 60 personality items (such as nice, funny, outgoing), which were rated on a scale from 1 to 7. The twist to their study was that the researchers asked a confidence question: How confident are you in your estimation of how your partner sees your personality?
In the past, researchers hadn't asked whether you know when you're accurate in first impressions, nor your degree of confidence, say the researchers. It was found that people who were poor at making good meta-impressions were less confident than people who made accurate ones. So, after making a first impression, if you're confident in your judgment, you're likely to be right.
At the crux of knowing you've made a good impression is something called calibration, or 'being confident when you're right and uncertain when you're wrong'. People who aren't well calibrated confident when they're wrong and uncertain when they're right.
The goal of their research is to enable people to trust the confidence of their first impressions and pursue the next step. When you have misjudged the way others see you, the result is often a bad decision. You might have thought that the date you went on went well and she liked you, but it went wrong in the date's eyes and she doesn't like you. Your next move could be embarrassing and painful, scientists say.
We're sometimes wrong about the impressions we've made, we might think that obviously the other person could tell that I hated them, or that I obviously liked them, or obviously my brilliance came across, but we've all been wrong, so it's important in any number of social settings when to actually doubt how you've come across.
For the most part, people understand when they're right and when they're wrong, say scientists, adding that if you want to know if you've made the right impression, simply trust your gut.
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