2024年4月16日发(作者：)

EAP Unit3 Psychology

Persons: Judging a Book by its Cover

Saul Kassin et al.

1. Have you ever met someone for the first time and formed a quick

impression based only on a quick “snapshot” of information? As children, we

were told that we should not judge a book by its cover, that things are not always

what they seem, that surface appearances are deceptive, and that all that glitters is

not gold. Yet as adults we can’t seem to help ourselves.

2. To illustrate the rapid-fire nature of the process, Janine Willis and Alexander

Todorov (2006) showed college students photographs of unfamiliar faces for

one-tenth of a second, half a second, or a full second. Whether the students

judged the faces for how attractive, likable, competent, trustworthy, or aggressive

they were, their ratings — even at the briefest exposure — were quick and were

highly correlated

with judgments that other observers made without time-exposure limits. Flip

quickly through the pages of an illustrated magazine, and you may see for yourself

that it takes a mere fraction of a second to form an impression of a stranger from

his or her face.

3. If first impressions are quick to form, then on what are they based? In 500

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BC, the mathematician Pythagoras looked into the eyes of prospective students to

determine if they were gifted. At about the same time, Hippocrates, the founder of

modern medicine, used facial features to make diagnoses of life and death. In the

nineteenth century, Viennese physician Franz Gall introduced a carnival-like

science called phrenology and claimed that he could assess a person’s character

by the shape

of their skulls. And in 1954, psychologist William Sheldon concluded from

flawed studies of adult men that there is a strong link between physique and

personality.

4. People may not measure each other by bumps on the head, as

phrenologists used to do, but our first impressions are influenced in subtle ways

by a person’s height, weight, skin color, hair color, tattoos, piercings, eyeglasses,

and other aspects of physical appearance. As social perceivers, we also form

impressions of people that are often accurately based on a host of indirect telltale

cues. In

Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

, Sam Gosling (2008) describes

research he has conducted showing that people’s personalities can be revealed

in the knick-knacks found in their offices and dormitory rooms, the identity claims

they make on Facebook pages, the books that line their shelves, and the types of

music that inhabit their iPods. In one study, fictional characters with

“old-generation” names such as Harry, Walter, Dorothy, and Edith were judged

to be less popular and less intelligent than those with younger-generation names

such as Kevin, Michael, Lisa, and Michelle. In another study, both men and women

were seen as more feminine when they spoke in high-pitched voices than in lower

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