Should you consider your first impression?

Imagine you are at a soccer or football game with this disgusting guy sitting next to you. He's loud, spills his drink on you, and taunts your team. Days later, you are walking to the park when suddenly it starts to rain.

Who should appear next to you to offer you an umbrella, the same boy from the football game? Do you change your mind about him because of their second meeting or do you go with your first impression and copies it?

Research in social psychology suggests that they quickly make lasting impressions of others based on their behavior. We managed to do this with little effort, to reduce static symptoms from a small behavior such as a harsh word or awkward move.

By using our impressions as a benchmark, we can make an accurate estimate of how people will behave in the future. Knowing that the boy from the football game was a jerk when you first met him. You can expect the same in future. If so, you can avoid seeing it next time. However, we can change our experience in light of new information.

On the one hand, learning very negative and very unethical information about someone has a better effect than learning very positive and very ethical information. Unfortunately, for a new friend of soccer games, his awful conduct in the sport can outweigh his correct conduct in the park.

Research shows that this bias occurs because immoral behavior is more indicative or reveals a person's true character. Good. So by this logic, when it comes to updating, the bad is always stronger than the good. Well, not necessarily, certain types of learning don't seem to lead to this negative bias.

When, for example, you learn about someone else's skills and competencies, this prejudice changes. In fact, this is positive information that needs to be weighed further.

Back to this soccer game. If a player hits a goal it will ultimately have a strong effect on your skills and if they lose the net, the two sides of the update story will eventually be fairly stable. Overall, behaviors that are perceived as less common also tend to overweight people when making and updating impressions.

More immoral actions and more effective actions. So what happens on a mental level when we update our impressions?

Using active magnetic resonance imaging, researchers have identified an extended network of brain regions that respond to new information that does not correspond to initial impressions. These generally include areas related to social awareness, attention and cognitive control. Furthermore, perceptions of how often this behavior occurs in daily life are associated with updating people's perceptions based on the behavior of people with ventral lateral prefrontal cortex and high thoracic slacks.

In other words, the brain follows the lower level of statistical characteristics of behavior. To make complex decisions about the character of others, he asks, "Is this person's behavior unique or is it not normal?" In the situation, end up a Good Samaritan with a disgusting soccer fan. Your brain says so well in my experience, someone owes their umbrella to someone.

But the way this guy behaved at a soccer game was unusual. So you make a decision to start with your first impression. This data includes good morals, your brain, and in a broader sense, you may be more concerned with very negative immoral acts done by another person than with very positive moral acts. However, this is a direct result of the relative rarity of such bad behavior.

We're more used to people being good most of the time, for example when they take the time to help a stranger in need. In this context, bad can be stronger than good. But only because there is more good.

Think about the last time you judged someone by their behavior, especially when you really feel like you changed your mind about someone. Was the behavior that made you update your experience something you expected someone to do, or was it something completely out of the ordinary?