Before You Say a Word

How and why we create first impressions

I was in the market for a new car. The old Volvo has served me well, but I quite fancied an upgrade. So, I spent a Saturday doing a tour of the many local car dealers.

At one smart looking dealership, I spotted a tidy little BMW and promptly headed straight forward. If you've been car shopping before you'll know as soon as you show any interest in a car, someone appears. He appeared from the site office as I walked up to the car.

A swagger that could have been confidence. Could have been arrogance. Duffle coat, torn jeans, an old pair of Adidas. Cigarette in one hand, hot drink in a polystyrene cup in the other. A smile with a gold tooth. A walking, talking stereotype.

My internal verdict arrived before he'd opened his mouth. Nope. Not today. Not from him.

I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I stayed, looked around, had the conversation. The rest of the interaction did little to change my mind. I left without a car.

The second car lot was different. The salesperson came out with her shoulders back and a warm smile. She gave me a confident handshake. She listened while I talked, wasn't pushy, and knew every detail about the car.

Sale in the bag. It turned out to be a great car.

Which is interesting, because I had already made up my mind about both of them before either had really had the opportunity to tell me who they were.

We like to think of communication as something that starts when we speak. It doesn't. It starts when someone sees us.

We also like to think we don't make judgements.

That turns out to be wrong too.

The tiny little verdict

There is something remarkably unsettling about first impressions when you look at the research.

One study by Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov found that people form judgements about faces after exposure of just 100 milliseconds. One tenth of a second. That's barely enough time to decide whether you have accidentally knocked over your tea.

And yet, as humans, we're already busy making a judgement about the person in front of us.

It gets more interesting. Once we've made an initial assessment, we tend to look for evidence that supports it. A positive impression makes it easier to interpret what comes next positively. A negative one creates a much steeper hill to climb.

This doesn't mean our first impressions are always right. They aren't. It means that being wrong doesn't stop the mechanism from working. The brain is not sitting there patiently waiting for the evidence. It is making a provisional decision and then updating it.

This makes perfect sense if you think about what the mechanism is for.

Michael Schaller describes this kind of rapid judgement as a form of inferential speed: a way of detecting potential social danger quickly. The ancient version of the problem might have been considerably more serious than deciding whether to buy a used BMW.

But the basic question is remarkably persistent:

Are you safe?

Or, in a modern social setting:

Are you here to help me or hurt me?

Not necessarily physically. You might hurt me socially. Embarrass me. Waste my time. Make me look foolish. Sell me something I don't want. Turn out to be difficult. Manipulate me.

And then there is another question running alongside it:

Are you competent?

Warmth and competence. Helpfulness and capability.

Do I like the feeling I get from this person? And do I think they know what they're doing?

It is a surprisingly efficient little system. We assess on warmth and agreeableness, and on competence. And we do it quickly. And we then tend to re-enforce our initial impression through the rest of the interaction.

And it starts running before the PowerPoint is switched on, or a first word is spoken.

The audience has already started

I've seen this on stages plenty of times. A speaker walks on. They shuffle. They look down. They adjust the microphone three times. They stare at their notes. They mumble something about being delighted to be there.

Nothing terrible has happened. They haven't said anything particularly wrong. But the audience has already begun answering questions.

Do they want to be here?

Are they comfortable doing this?

Do they know what they're talking about?

Should I pay attention?

The speaker may be brilliant. They may have spent six months researching the subject. They may have a genuinely useful idea. The next forty-five minutes might contain the best talk anyone in the room has heard all year.

But communication has already started.

This is why I find first impressions more interesting than the usual advice about them. It isn't really about looking good. It's about understanding that everything is a signal.

Your clothes are a signal. Your posture is a signal. The way you enter a room is a signal. Whether you make eye contact is a signal. Whether you smile is a signal. How quickly you get to the point is a signal. Even your apparent comfort or discomfort is a signal. It's why people who are slower moving, slower speaking and pause before responding are often seen as more confident.

And because we are human beings rather than highly tuned communication machines, other people are going to interpret those signals whether we intended to send them or not.

Which is slightly unfair

There is an uncomfortable side to all of this. You can do everything right and still be judged incorrectly.

The man on the car lot might have been an excellent salesperson who happened to enjoy cigarettes, battered Adidas and gold teeth. The person sitting quietly at the back of a conference might be the most knowledgeable person in the room.

The nervous speaker might have written the best talk of the day. The confident person might be an absolute fraud. We should be careful here.

There is a difference between understanding how judgement works and pretending that the judgement is necessarily fair.

It isn't.

First impressions are shortcuts. Useful shortcuts, sometimes. Unfair shortcuts, sometimes. But they are shortcuts nonetheless. And the fact that we know this doesn't make us immune to them.

In the video I made about this, I found that particularly interesting: research suggests that first impressions aren't simply something made by highly judgemental people. Children make them. Adults make them. People who think of themselves as good judges of character make them. People who don't think they're judgemental make them.

You don't opt out simply by being a nice person. The mechanism is already installed.

So what do you do with that?

The answer isn't to become an actor. Please don't walk into your next meeting with a permanently fixed smile and the posture of an enthusiastic mannequin on wheels. The point is not to manufacture an impression.

It is to remove unnecessary obstacles to the impression you actually want to make.

If you're about to speak to a room of people, walk into it as though you're pleased to be there and the audience want to hear what you have to say. Stand as tall as you can. Look at people. Smile. Take up enough space to look comfortable.

If you're meeting someone for the first time, pay attention to them rather than spending the first thirty seconds rehearsing what you're going to say next.

Dress for the situation. This isn't about expensive clothes or dressing up as someone you're not. It is about understanding the context. The car salesperson in a tuxedo would be strange. The conference speaker in cycling shorts would certainly be memorable – I should know, I've seen that.

Clothes communicate before we do.

And there is an interesting loop here: what we wear can affect how we feel, which affects how we carry ourselves, which affects what other people see.

The signal travels both ways.

The same is true of posture. You don't need to pretend to be confident. Sometimes simply standing in a way that allows you to breathe properly makes you feel more capable.

There is nothing mystical about it. We're physical creatures. Our bodies are part of the conversation.

The microphone is already on

The thing I find most useful about first-impression research isn't actually the advice about smiling or standing up straight.

It's the reminder that communication begins before intention catches up with it.

We are constantly giving other people information about ourselves. Sometimes deliberately. Mostly not.

This matters particularly when the stakes are high. A job interview. A sales meeting. A presentation. A first day at work.

In all of these situations, the other person is trying to answer a question that you cannot completely control:

What sort of person is this?

You can't dictate their answer. You can't guarantee that they will like you. You can't prevent them from bringing their own assumptions, prejudices and experiences into the room. But you can give them better information to work with.

That is the useful bit. You aren't trying to control the impression. You're trying to make sure that the person they meet is reasonably close to the person you actually are.

Which brings us back to the car lot.

I still don't know whether my first judgement was fair. Probably not. I do know that I made it. I also know that the second salesperson gave me almost no reason to spend the rest of the conversation looking for evidence that I had made the wrong decision.

She looked comfortable. She looked pleased to see me. She listened. She knew her stuff. Warmth and competence.

It turns out that's quite a lot of information to communicate before you've even said hello.

The useful bit

First impressions aren't a verdict. They're a starting hypothesis. Other people will form one quickly, whether we like it or not.

So when the situation matters, pay attention to the signals you're already sending:

Warmth — Do I look like someone who is here to help?

Competence — Do I look like someone who knows what they're doing?

Presence — Do I look as though I actually want to be here?

Context — Does the way I dress, move and behave make sense for this particular situation?

None of this means performing a character. Quite the opposite actually. The best first impression is usually the least fake one: comfortable, interested, capable and human.

You don't get to choose what people think. But you do get to choose what you give them to think about.