The new neighbor.

A moving truck pulls up next door. Your new neighbor steps out. They don’t wave back when you lift your hand. They look tired, unsmiling, and they go inside without a word.

Within seconds, a picture starts forming: unfriendly, maybe rude, probably not someone you will get along with.

Two weeks later, you learn more. They had driven through the night after a family funeral to start a new job. They hadn’t seen you wave at all.

The next morning, they knock on your door with a plate of cookies and an apology for seeming distant.

People form impressions of others astonishingly fast, sometimes within a tenth of a second of seeing a face. These snap judgments feel confident, but they are often wrong.

We also tend to explain other people’s behavior by their personality (“they’re rude”) while explaining our own by our circumstances (“I was exhausted”). Once an impression forms, we tend to notice what fits it.

A first impression is a starting point. Getting a second one takes a little time, a little curiosity, and sometimes a second chance.

Quick read, fuller picture

A brief history of first impressions

• 1946 — Psychologist Solomon Asch finds that changing a single word, “warm” or “cold,” in a list of traits changes the whole impression people form.
• 1950 — Harold Kelley shows that students who were told a guest lecturer was “warm” rated him more favorably than students told he was “cold,” after the same lecture.
• 1977 — Psychologist Lee Ross names the fundamental attribution error: blaming personality while overlooking circumstances.
• 2006 — Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov find that people form judgments about faces after seeing them for only a tenth of a second.

A first impression is the first page, not the whole story.