研究发现：第一印象很难被改变

新的研究发现，第一印象很难被改变。但好消息是，人们的快速判断往往是准确的。

两项新研究的结果表明，人们对某人先入为主的初步判断很难发生改变。

研究中要求测试者们先看一个人的照片，然后预先判断如果跟这个人发生互动会有怎样的感觉。一个多月后，测试者们同照片中的人进行了互动，结果之前的预测惊人的准确。

多伦多大学的心理学家想知道，当事先知道的信息跟他们相互了解之后的新发现发生冲突时会怎样。为了找到这个问题的答案，研究者们对现实生活中的同性恋行为进行了研究。一般来说，人们可以通过观察一个人的脸来判断他到底是不是同性恋，而且准确率高达65%。

研究人员要求测试者看男同性恋和异性恋的照片。照片中有一半被贴上正确性取向的标签。另外一半标签确实错的，也就是说，照片是直男却贴的同性恋，反之亦然。接下来测试者们必须做个电脑测试，根据标签回忆照片上的人是同性恋还是异性恋。结果是他们真的知道每个人正确的性取向。

实验的重点是人们观察人脸所需要的时间。仅凭20秒观察人脸便断定性取向的人更有可能是靠着直觉做出判断。这意味着他们会猜出跟标签相反的真实性取向。用时过久的答案则可能来自标签。

在第二个实验中，研究人员对可信与不可信的面孔做了测试。照片相对应的标签描述的是类似在医院做志愿者这种靠得住的行为或是像偷窃这种靠不住的行为。人们记住相匹配的面孔和行为要比记住不匹配的面孔和行为容易得多，但是人们对面孔的记忆能力显然比对行为的记忆能力强。研究结果表明，每一次看到一个人时，对这些人最初的快速判断将会再次出现。

First impressions are hard to dislodge, new research finds. The good news is that people's snap judgments about others tend to be accurate.

Two new studies presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Austin, Texas, reveal that people both have a hard time getting over the first thing they know about someone, and that they're actually pretty good at judging a book by its cover.

"Despite the well-known idiom to 'not judge a book by its cover,' the present research shows that such judgments about the cover are good proxies for judgments about the book — even after reading it," Vivian Zayas, a psychologist at Cornell University, said in a statement.

Zayas and her colleagues asked participants to view a photograph of a person and make a snap judgment about how he or she would feel about that person if they interacted.

More than a month later, the participant and the person in the photo did actually interact. People's predictions of how much they'd like the person in the photo were surprisingly accurate, Zayas and her colleagues report.

On the other hand, no one can be right about everything. Psychologist Nicholas Rule of the University of Toronto and colleagues wanted to know what happens when initial information about a person conflicts with new discoveries that come out as they get to know each other.

To test the question, the researchers took advantage of real-life gaydar: On average, people are able, with about 65 percent accuracy, to tell from a person's face whether they are gay or straight.

The researchers asked participants to look at pictures of both gay and straight men. In half of cases, the photos were labeled with the person's correct sexual orientation. In the other half, the label was wrong, saying that a straight man was gay or vice versa.

Next, the participants had to take a computer quiz, correctly recalling whether each man was gay or straight, according to the labels. They saw each face come up on screen and had to answer correctly for every single photograph three times. If they made a single mistake, they had to start all over again.

"By the end, they really knew who was gay and who was straight," Rule told Live Science.

The twist, Rule said, was that the participants were given different amounts of time to see the faces in the quiz section. Some went through the pictures at their own pace; others had as little as a 20th of a second, the amount of time it takes people to judge sexual orientation from a face alone.

People who saw the faces for only a 20th of a second were more likely to go with their gut feeling on the person's sexuality — meaning they were likely to guess the person's real orientation instead of what the false labels said. People who had all the time they needed were more likely to answer according to the labels.

In a second experiment, the researchers replicated the findings with trustworthy and untrustworthy faces, matched with labels describing either trustworthy behavior like volunteering at a hospital or untrustworthy behavior like stealing. People remember untrustworthy faces and untrustworthy behavior better than they recall goodie-two-shoes, but the memory boost for the faces is stronger than for the behavior, Rule and his colleagues found.

The findings suggest that every time an individual sees another person, their initial snap judgments of them re-emerge, Rule said.

"Their face is a constant reminder to us of that initial impression," he said. With more time, people recover their knowledge of what they learned about the person, but first impressions remain very important and seem not to fade, he added.

Other research has found that teachers who are introduced to certain students with assurances that these children will bloom by the end of the year focus more attention on those kids, essentially creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teachers also prefer students who are more attractive, and attractiveness predicts success in life.

"It goes to show that perhaps the opportunities that one gets in life can be very much shaped by one's face," Rule said.