A first impression is a guess wearing a confident face.

REFLECTION

WHAT THIS MEANS

What feels like seeing someone is really a very fast guess. Two minutes of information gets turned into a whole personality, and the process is invisible, so the result arrives in your head as an observation rather than as the hunch it actually is. The confidence is a feature of how quickly it happened, not of how much you know.

Try labelling it out loud, even silently, as a guess. Say to yourself that you think they are stuck-up, and that you have known them for four minutes. Holding it that loosely leaves room for the much more interesting thing, which is finding out you were wrong.

A QUESTION TO SIT WITH

Which confident first guess about a person proved wrong?

MORE IN PERCEPTION & ATTENTION

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