The long-term implication of the first impression bias is referred to as the halo effect, which plays out when a positive first impression about one trait, such as beauty, leads people to infer the existence of other traits, such as intelligence. The Pygmalion effect occurs when someone else’s high expectations of us becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, pushing us to do better. Notably, the first impression bias is not an isolated effect, but rather leads to the development of many subsequent cognitive biases such as the halo effect and the confirmation bias. Further, this finding can carry over to price targets and recommendations.
Specifically, Hirschleifer and colleagues found that if a firm performs well in the year before an analyst follows that firm, the analyst is optimistic in subsequent forecasts and vice versa. They found that finance professionals are prone to the first impression bias in their forecasts of the earnings for the firms that they cover. Hirshleifer and colleagues (2020) examined whether an analyst’s first impressions of a firm would induce bias in analyst forecasting behaviour. 7 This has many implications, but an interesting example of this exists among finance professionals. The first impression bias can influence decision makers to place more weight on information first received, than information received later. 4 Recall that the first impression bias can influence recruiters appraisal of a candidate therefore, it seems that if national culture is shared among candidate and recruiter, the recruiter will not make assumptions about the candidates capabilities or character as they would with someone not of the same national culture. For example, Fang and colleagues (2020) found that national culture – the shared attitude or beliefs that separate members of one group from another – reduces first impression bias. More recent work has focused on first impressions’ role in different disciplines and across cultures. 5 The confirmation bias was later described by Peter Wason in 1960, using the Wason’s Rule Discovery Test. The halo effect was discovered by Edward Thorndike, an American psychologist and early behaviorist, in 1920, but was not given its term until 1938 by S. Later work on first impression bias focused on how other cognitive biases, such as the halo effect and confirmation bias, perpetuate the first impression bias. 12 However, this approach fell out of favor in the 19th century due to its similarity to phrenology, a pseudoscience that correlates measurements of bumps on the skull with personality characteristics. This information could then be used to determine if a person suited a particular occupation.
FIRST IMPRESSION EXAMPLE SERIES
In the 1700s, Johann Kaspar Lavater, a Swiss pastor, published a series of essays on how face features such as the shape of a nose and the closeness of eyebrows were important in determining a person’s intelligence, kindness, and perseverance.
Early research on the psychology of first impressions was focused almost exclusively on physical traits and personality, as attributes of the face were considered to be telling of a person’s character traits.
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