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What can be concluded from the study conducted by Ferguson?
First impressions can affect your life course – how you
manage job interviews, whether you gain friends at
social gatherings, etc. A study by Harvard psychologist
Mahzarin Banaji showed that first impressions can strike
us even after we think we have abandoned them. Still,
however quickly and unintentionally these impressions
form themselves in us, we are not mindless robots.
“People have some flexibility,” says psychologist
Melissa Ferguson from Cornell University, who is
interested in how people form, and change, their
impressions of others. She has a guy named Bob
to thank for her findings. For her studies, Ferguson
introduces test subjects to a fictional character named
Bob. Sometimes Bob is portrayed as good, with a list of
a hundred nice behaviours. When subjects find out he is
convicted of an immoral act involving a child, the good
impression of Bob completely flips. Other times, Bob
does a hundred things making study subjects see him
as a moderately nasty guy. Then it is revealed that Bob
donated a kidney to a stranger. Here too, Ferguson's
subjects adjusted their opinion; they thought better of
him, but still did not think well of him. “They did not flip,”
she says. “A single piece of extremely negative
information undoes a positive first impression, but it
does not work the same way in the opposite direction.
It takes more to overcome a negative first impression.”