Attractive, trustworthy, likeable or competent? Our brains judge new faces within a tenth of a second.
Credit: National Institutes of Health
SYDNEY, 28 August 2006: Ever get the feeling you don't make a good first impression? It might be because of your face, a U.S. study suggests.
When we see a new face, our brains decide within a tenth of a second whether the owner is attractive, trustworthy, likeable or competent, according to a study by researchers at Princeton University in New Jersey and published in the July issue of the journal, Psychological Science.
"The link between facial features and character may be tenuous at best, but that doesn't stop our minds from sizing other people up at a glance," said Alexander Todorov, co-author of the study. "We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them."
After experiments conducted on 200 subjects, Todorov and co-author Janine Willis found that people responded to faces so rapidly that their reasoning minds did not have time to influence their reaction.
In one experiment, participants were shown 66 different faces for 100, 500 or 1,000 milliseconds. As each face flashed on and off the screen, the subjects indicated whether they found the face trustworthy or not, and how confident they were in their judgements.
For most of the subjects, 100 milliseconds proved enough to make an assessment.
"What we found was that, if given more time, people's fundamental judgement about faces did not change," Todorov said. "Observers simply became more confident in their judgements as the duration lengthened."
While the reasons for making these snap judgements are not entirely clear, Todorov suspects they are influenced by the part of our brain that responds directly to fear.
"The fear response involves the amygdala, a part of the brain that existed in animals for millions of years before the development of the prefrontal cortex, where rational thoughts come from," he said. "We imagine trust to be a rather sophisticated response, but our observations indicate that trust might be a case of a high-level judgment being made by a low-level brain structure. Perhaps the signal bypasses the cortex altogether."
According to the authors, our intuitions about attraction and trust are those we form most rapidly. "It appears we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way," Todorov said.
However he thinks these initial impressions can be overcome by the rational mind. "As time passes and you get to know people, you, of course, develop a more rounded conception of them," he said.
