Can we trust first impressions
In our daily life, we will always hear a wealth of such cases as a guy who has fallen into love with a girl at the first sight, one of your friends who impresses your mother deeply on his first visit to your house and then is treated exceptionally well by your hard-to-be-pleased mother, and even the applicant who attracts to the human resources manager immediately during the first interview is easily employed, to name just a few. All of the above-mentioned cases tell us that many people in the world trust the first impressions of a person, his character, his conduct and his eloquence, etc., all of which he displays at their first meet. But is all that he displays, or all that you understand through what he displays correct, or it is just a blur image that needs to be proved in the later days?
Before we get the question to be treated, let’s think of the most probable (not absolutely) results of the cases mentioned in the first paragraph:
The guy who has just experienced the above-said romance has to say goodbye to his newly-met girlfriend because later on he finds out that she is not as good as she looks; the friend of yours who has just won your hard-to-be-pleased mother’s trust is criticized by your mother because of his great incoherency in his manners, and even the newly-employed employee is dismissed because he is not telling the truth in his resume. Till now, do you still think the first impressions are dependable?
Psychologically, we have a very perfect image of a person in our head, of course, which varies from one to another owing to individuals’ specific experiences, education and family background, and his or her own opinion. When a person who we meet confirms with the image in our head, we will, to a great extent, overestimate or even exaggerate his merits, while omit his shortcomings, maybe due to human nature and psychological reasons.
Thus we can ourselves lead to the answer to the question above that the first impressions of a person are generally incorrect. In a word, to judge a person needs time and the first-sight impression is unreliable.
