Businesses often emphasize the importance of first impressions, and recent psychological research has focused on determining whether or not first impressions are accurate representations of a person.
Tufts Professor Nalini Ambady of the psychology department has dedicated her research to measuring the precision of snap judgments.
Graduate student Joan Chiao explained that Ambady examines non-verbal cues that lead to people's perceptions of others, including their sexuality, emotions, personality traits and relationships.
Recently, Ambady received heightened media coverage of her research when it was featured in a book entitled "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking," by Ambady's acquaintance Malcolm Gladwell. The book investigates the power of first impressions through a wide range of stories and anecdotes.
"[Gladwell] looked at clips of my work, but I knew him from before," Ambady said.
"Malcolm uses Dr. Ambady's research to argue that people use their intuitions to make snap decisions about other people and these intuitions are often accurate," Chiao said.
"There is in all of our brains a mighty backstage process, which works its will subconsciously," Gladwell said in an interview with The New York Times. "Through this process we have the capacity to sift huge amounts of information, blend data, isolate telling details and come to astonishingly rapid conclusions, even in the first two seconds of seeing something."
Prior to joining the psychology department at Tufts in 2004, Ambady taught at Harvard University.
While at Harvard, Ambady set out to examine the nonverbal aspects of good teaching. As a basis of her research, she used videotapes of teaching which had been made during a training program at Harvard. Students were shown the clips without sound, and then asked to rate the effectiveness of the teachers by their expressions and physical cues.
Ambady had initially wanted to show minute-long clips; however, after reviewing the tapes she realized there were only 10 seconds when the teachers were shown apart from the students.
The students, however, had no difficulty rating the professors based upon the 10-second soundless clip. The evaluations collected from these students were then compared with evaluations made, after a full semester of classes, by students of the same teachers. The ratings were astonishingly similar.
Ambady's next step was to cut the clips down to two seconds and showed it to a new group of students. Again, the ratings matched those of the students who had sat through an entire term, suggesting the accuracy of first impressions.
Ambady's research has received widespread coverage since the release of "Blink."
Sam Sommers, an associate psychology professor at Tufts, believes the coverage is good for both Ambady as well as for psychology in general.
"Professor Ambady is a very well respected, world renowned psychologist, and I think it's great that the public at large is beginning to see her work," he said. "It is great when psychological research such as this is brought to the public eye."
