The First Impression Bias
What is the First Impression Bias?
The first impression bias describes how we make quick judgements about others that are often subject to bias or error. The theory stems from the idea that humans are limited in their information processing abilities and will often rely on the first piece(s) of information they receive.
The Basic Idea
Everyone wants to make a good first impression, whether it’s for a job interview or meeting a partner’s parents for the first time. But did you know that we have less than a minute to do so? Behavioral scientists call it the first impression bias: a limitation in human information processing that causes us to make quick and incomplete observations about others based on the first piece of information we perceive.9
First impressions are often very important, as they lead to quick assumptions and judgements. It takes as little as a tenth of a second or up to 30 seconds to make a first impression; moreover, there is much debate as to whether these impressions are even accurate. The first impression bias has implications for employment, relationships, ideas, business, and even medicine.
Your first impression of a thing sets up your subsequent beliefs. If the company looks inept to you, you may assume everything else they do is inept.
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
