how easy is it to spoil somebody’s impression of you when you have already known them for a bit?
Spoiling is trivially easy—just mention that you like to torture kittens in your spare time.
Without such drastic admissions, are you really asking whether someone’s opinion of you can radically decrease without you doing anything that seems out of the ordinary to you? I guess, but you also have to keep in mind the difference between what the other person things and what s/he is willing to show.
For example, let’s say Alice and Bob meet. Alice doesn’t really like Bob but she is polite so she doesn’t show it in an obvious fashion plus she hopes that maybe Bob isn’t as bad as he looks. After a bit of time Alice’s opinion of Bob is still the same but now she sees less reason to be polite and have decided that yes, Bob is as bad as he looks. From the Bob’s point of view it looks as if Alice took a sudden dislike to him, but from Alice’s point of view she just allowed herself to show her true attitude which didn’t change much.
Without such drastic admissions, are you really asking whether someone’s opinion of you can radically decrease without you doing anything that seems out of the ordinary to you?
Essentially, yes. The question wasn’t particularly clear, I admit, because I don’t know how to phrase it more clearly, except for individual examples, and I want a slightly more general answer.
But, to give one example scenario of the kind I have in mind, take this: we know that appearing confident is important for the first impression. What happens if a person has formed an impression of you as confident, but later you display some clearly non-confident behavior?
There is the fundamental attribution error working against you, but there’s also the fact that people in general don’t like updating. And as I said, my personal experience shows such high variance that I feel very clueless; I’ve seen decent people who remain friends with others I would long have thrown out of my social circle, and other people who irredeemably condemn you as soon as you commit the slightest blunder. Somehow the latter group seemed to be more pathological than the first, for independent reasons, but still… I feel a desperate need for data.
I guess, but you also have to keep in mind the difference between what the other person thinks and what s/he is willing to show.
I’m keeping that in mind all the time, which is why I called the signals noisy. They are, to an annoying extreme.
That analysis is self centered. It can often be much more useful to ask yourself: “What does this person want? How can I act in a way to help that person to get what they wants?” than to ask yourself: “How will that person judge me for what I do?”
If you interact with me and make a social blunder that makes you appear inconfident, so what if I get the outcome from the interaction that I want?
The outcome might not even be self centered. I like effectively helping someone else improve themselves. If someone asks me advice on something and comes back a week later and tells me he implemented my advice I feel good because something I did had an effect even if it produced no direct personal benefit.
Different people have different goals. One person might want to hang out to avoid being lonely. Another person might want to hang out to with someone have an audience for his jokes. Some people might want to hang out with cool people because then other people will think they are cool.
Traits like confidence do have some effects but you will never make sense of people actions if you don’t think about their goals.
Goals also change. Two years ago I engaged in a lot of actions to prove to myself that I’m confident. I satisfied that need and moved on to other topics.
I did things like walking in my dancing course with a 3 people film crew who were filming a documentary about Quantified Self and this was part of a story about how I measure my pulse while dancing Salsa.
In some sense that’s supposed to be a high status signal.
On the other hands that’s not how it works. Having genuine connections with people and caring about what they want matters a lot more than engineering the right status signals and right impressions.
There might be people that you can effectively impress over a long time with a carefully engineered high status first impression but in general that’s not the kind of people I want to hang out with. Most people care about whether they have a genuine interaction with you. If you give a high status impression it might they might more likely find the fault at first with them and give you a bit of a benefit of a doubt to develop connection but if no genuine connection develops all your first impression of being confident or otherwise high status won’t help you with developing friendships.
That is a good point. I generally feel very powerless when it comes to figuring out what other people want and providing it. Maybe I should make this more of a focus.
In my experience figuring out what other people want get’s easier if you have a bit of mental distance and can take the far view.
If you are focused on what you can do to achieve a certain objective in the next 5 minutes, it’s hard to see deeper goals of other people.
Even if you ask them few people will give you their deepest motivations Someone who’s lonely and who core motivation comes from the search for companionship won’t admit it as doing so would make him emotionally vulnerable.
If you are all the time worried what first impression you make and how the other person judges you, it’s also unlikely that you will understand them on that level.
It can be much more about relaxing and listen to the other person than about trying to do something.
First, I think that the high variance and the noise are just characteristics of real life. People are different AND incoherent AND impulsive AND prone to change their mind.
Even if you manage to gather enough data to form some reasonable central estimates, the variance will remain huge.
Second, it’s not clear to me what kind of an answer do you hope to get. Technically you are asking a simple yes/no question and the answer to it is obviously “yes”, but between that and a full-blown model of human behavior in relationships I am not sure what are you looking for. Can you give an example of what an answer (not necessarily a correct one) might look like?
Uhm, technically, I’m asking a degree question, not a yes/no-question…
People are different AND incoherent AND impulsive AND prone to change their mind.
Well, especially the last conjunct is not obvious by any means. :)
Here’s an example of a possible “personal experience” answer: “In my experience of so-and-so many years, in this-and-that demographic, people tend to stick to their initial impressions. It takes a certain time or relatively persistent behavior to the contrary for them to change their initial assessment, e.g. for them to judge that you’re not as smart or confident as they initially believed you to be. Certain (comparatively rare) individuals are exceptions to this and are, as it were, on the look-out for faults in others. Individuals may be on in one or the other group only for a particular gender-mixture, in particular, they may be of the “forgiving” kind for same-gender interactions, but of the judgmental kind for cross-gender interactions. This is the most common deviation from uniform attitudes.”
I admit that I’m having a hard time figuring out what to look for in the way of scientific studies of friendship and relationships that would be relevant to this, which may explain why I didn’t find anything on a first cursory search.
So any help in precisifying the question in order to increase answerability is also welcome.
Well, I am not you, but I would consider that example answer to be entirely useless. It effectively says that people stick to initial impressions until they don’t and, oh, there are exceptions. “Certain time” can be five seconds or five years. And what would be practical implications? That first impressions matter? We already know that.
And that, of course, before considering that various groups and subcultures are likely to have different norms in this respect.
Maybe it’s worth shortcutting to a more-terminal goal? Are you looking to be liked? Do you want to control a relationship? Are you trying to forecast which relationships are likely to remain stable and which are not?
Of course the answer is exceedingly vague, but I wouldn’t expect anyone to track their experience in such a fashion as to give actual numbers. Though examples with months would of course be nice, but in any case, it would still be informative. It would tell me that the judgmental ones that immediately flip their judgments are particular exceptional individuals and that this is not normal; it would also tell me that it’s the identity of individuals that explains the variation, while individuals don’t change their behavior constantly (i.e. if you’ve seen someone be tolerant with others, you can expect them to be tolerant with you). It would tell me that you wouldn’t need to worry about isolated incidents a few weeks or months apart, especially with parties of the same gender.
What I know of first impressions is mostly how rich they are. I’m asking about their resilience. Maybe there is something well-known here that I’m simply unaware of and that you consider obvious.
And that, of course, before considering that various groups and subcultures are likely to have different norms in this respect.
Which is why the answer included “that-and-that demographic”… To be honest, though, I’m not sure that I would actually expect that much variation between groups/subcultures.
Maybe it’s worth shortcutting to a more-terminal goal? Are you looking to be liked? Do you want to control a relationship? Are you trying to forecast which relationships are likely to remain stable and which are not?
Good point. It’s essentially the last one. This feeling I have of not knowing what’s going on and what’s normal is a source of anxiety to me (not in the clinical sense of social anxiety, but it makes me worry). Right now, I have some relationships with such low signal-to-noise ratios that I can really only operate on priors about, broadly speaking, humanity in general. (Discarding these relationships in favour of less bothersome one’s isn’t an option for various reasons.)
Maybe there is something well-known here that I’m simply unaware of and that you consider obvious.
I think I’m coming from the position that once you have information about a specific person and a specific relationship, general priors are pretty much useless.
To give a simple example, women are, on the average, shorter than men and that would be my prior about the height of someone before seeing her. But once I see her, the prior is completely superseded by the concrete information that I now have.
In the same way when evaluating whether someone specific is likely to change his/her opinion of me, I will rely almost completely on my knowledge of that particular person and not on generic priors.
This feeling I have of not knowing what’s going on and what’s normal is a source of anxiety to me
Well… I wouldn’t worry too much about what’s “normal”, though I’ll point out that e.g. the mainstream picture of women paints them as very emotionally labile in sexually-charged situation.
You might also consider that you are being played games with. Might be for control (to keep you off-balance) or might be just for fun—some people like drama.
Well, maybe the only wisdom to be had here is really that if you don’t have much more than priors to go on, tough luck, nothing you can do, live with the uncertainty and hope for the best (because actively asking for evidence is too costly). It’s likely that this this doesn’t bother you as much as me because you’re just better at reading social cues; however the hell one is supposed to learn that, especially if one is an introvert and experiences a consequent poverty of stimulus.
Although sometimes it’s not even about observing clues. For example, one might know that it’s likely that one will at some point behave in some way that the other person would view unfavorably; and you want to estimate how much you should invest in this relationship. Then the only relevant evidence you can get is how this person behaves in dealing with other people.
Imagine a situation where Bob asks Dave: Dave? Why didn’t you come to my birthday party on Monday?
Dave replies: “Monday I was busy torturing kittens.”
In most cases, if someone would tell me that they torture kittens in their spare time I first impulse wouldn’t be to conclude that they are actually torturing kittens.
The kind of person who can openly joke about torturing kittens in their spare time is likely high confidence. In some social contexts that joke will still get you looked down upon. Knowing what kind of jokes are acceptable and having the ability to push to that limit demonstrates social savviness.
Okay, here’s a better one: If the subject of sex comes up, just say “Haha I’m actually a pedophile, though, soo....” Avoid laughing, or even smiling, and maintain expectant eye contact until they respond. If they ask whether you’re joking then make an expression like you’re about to cry, and then leave the conversation.
Bam, person has an extremely negative opinion of you :)
Spoiling is trivially easy—just mention that you like to torture kittens in your spare time.
Without such drastic admissions, are you really asking whether someone’s opinion of you can radically decrease without you doing anything that seems out of the ordinary to you? I guess, but you also have to keep in mind the difference between what the other person things and what s/he is willing to show.
For example, let’s say Alice and Bob meet. Alice doesn’t really like Bob but she is polite so she doesn’t show it in an obvious fashion plus she hopes that maybe Bob isn’t as bad as he looks. After a bit of time Alice’s opinion of Bob is still the same but now she sees less reason to be polite and have decided that yes, Bob is as bad as he looks. From the Bob’s point of view it looks as if Alice took a sudden dislike to him, but from Alice’s point of view she just allowed herself to show her true attitude which didn’t change much.
Essentially, yes. The question wasn’t particularly clear, I admit, because I don’t know how to phrase it more clearly, except for individual examples, and I want a slightly more general answer.
But, to give one example scenario of the kind I have in mind, take this: we know that appearing confident is important for the first impression. What happens if a person has formed an impression of you as confident, but later you display some clearly non-confident behavior?
There is the fundamental attribution error working against you, but there’s also the fact that people in general don’t like updating. And as I said, my personal experience shows such high variance that I feel very clueless; I’ve seen decent people who remain friends with others I would long have thrown out of my social circle, and other people who irredeemably condemn you as soon as you commit the slightest blunder. Somehow the latter group seemed to be more pathological than the first, for independent reasons, but still… I feel a desperate need for data.
I’m keeping that in mind all the time, which is why I called the signals noisy. They are, to an annoying extreme.
That analysis is self centered. It can often be much more useful to ask yourself: “What does this person want? How can I act in a way to help that person to get what they wants?” than to ask yourself: “How will that person judge me for what I do?”
If you interact with me and make a social blunder that makes you appear inconfident, so what if I get the outcome from the interaction that I want?
The outcome might not even be self centered. I like effectively helping someone else improve themselves. If someone asks me advice on something and comes back a week later and tells me he implemented my advice I feel good because something I did had an effect even if it produced no direct personal benefit.
Different people have different goals. One person might want to hang out to avoid being lonely. Another person might want to hang out to with someone have an audience for his jokes. Some people might want to hang out with cool people because then other people will think they are cool.
Traits like confidence do have some effects but you will never make sense of people actions if you don’t think about their goals.
Goals also change. Two years ago I engaged in a lot of actions to prove to myself that I’m confident. I satisfied that need and moved on to other topics.
I did things like walking in my dancing course with a 3 people film crew who were filming a documentary about Quantified Self and this was part of a story about how I measure my pulse while dancing Salsa. In some sense that’s supposed to be a high status signal.
On the other hands that’s not how it works. Having genuine connections with people and caring about what they want matters a lot more than engineering the right status signals and right impressions.
There might be people that you can effectively impress over a long time with a carefully engineered high status first impression but in general that’s not the kind of people I want to hang out with. Most people care about whether they have a genuine interaction with you. If you give a high status impression it might they might more likely find the fault at first with them and give you a bit of a benefit of a doubt to develop connection but if no genuine connection develops all your first impression of being confident or otherwise high status won’t help you with developing friendships.
That is a good point. I generally feel very powerless when it comes to figuring out what other people want and providing it. Maybe I should make this more of a focus.
In my experience figuring out what other people want get’s easier if you have a bit of mental distance and can take the far view. If you are focused on what you can do to achieve a certain objective in the next 5 minutes, it’s hard to see deeper goals of other people.
Even if you ask them few people will give you their deepest motivations Someone who’s lonely and who core motivation comes from the search for companionship won’t admit it as doing so would make him emotionally vulnerable.
If you are all the time worried what first impression you make and how the other person judges you, it’s also unlikely that you will understand them on that level.
It can be much more about relaxing and listen to the other person than about trying to do something.
Two reactions to this.
First, I think that the high variance and the noise are just characteristics of real life. People are different AND incoherent AND impulsive AND prone to change their mind.
Even if you manage to gather enough data to form some reasonable central estimates, the variance will remain huge.
Second, it’s not clear to me what kind of an answer do you hope to get. Technically you are asking a simple yes/no question and the answer to it is obviously “yes”, but between that and a full-blown model of human behavior in relationships I am not sure what are you looking for. Can you give an example of what an answer (not necessarily a correct one) might look like?
Uhm, technically, I’m asking a degree question, not a yes/no-question…
Well, especially the last conjunct is not obvious by any means. :)
Here’s an example of a possible “personal experience” answer: “In my experience of so-and-so many years, in this-and-that demographic, people tend to stick to their initial impressions. It takes a certain time or relatively persistent behavior to the contrary for them to change their initial assessment, e.g. for them to judge that you’re not as smart or confident as they initially believed you to be. Certain (comparatively rare) individuals are exceptions to this and are, as it were, on the look-out for faults in others. Individuals may be on in one or the other group only for a particular gender-mixture, in particular, they may be of the “forgiving” kind for same-gender interactions, but of the judgmental kind for cross-gender interactions. This is the most common deviation from uniform attitudes.”
I admit that I’m having a hard time figuring out what to look for in the way of scientific studies of friendship and relationships that would be relevant to this, which may explain why I didn’t find anything on a first cursory search.
So any help in precisifying the question in order to increase answerability is also welcome.
Well, I am not you, but I would consider that example answer to be entirely useless. It effectively says that people stick to initial impressions until they don’t and, oh, there are exceptions. “Certain time” can be five seconds or five years. And what would be practical implications? That first impressions matter? We already know that.
And that, of course, before considering that various groups and subcultures are likely to have different norms in this respect.
Maybe it’s worth shortcutting to a more-terminal goal? Are you looking to be liked? Do you want to control a relationship? Are you trying to forecast which relationships are likely to remain stable and which are not?
Of course the answer is exceedingly vague, but I wouldn’t expect anyone to track their experience in such a fashion as to give actual numbers. Though examples with months would of course be nice, but in any case, it would still be informative. It would tell me that the judgmental ones that immediately flip their judgments are particular exceptional individuals and that this is not normal; it would also tell me that it’s the identity of individuals that explains the variation, while individuals don’t change their behavior constantly (i.e. if you’ve seen someone be tolerant with others, you can expect them to be tolerant with you). It would tell me that you wouldn’t need to worry about isolated incidents a few weeks or months apart, especially with parties of the same gender.
What I know of first impressions is mostly how rich they are. I’m asking about their resilience. Maybe there is something well-known here that I’m simply unaware of and that you consider obvious.
Which is why the answer included “that-and-that demographic”… To be honest, though, I’m not sure that I would actually expect that much variation between groups/subcultures.
Good point. It’s essentially the last one. This feeling I have of not knowing what’s going on and what’s normal is a source of anxiety to me (not in the clinical sense of social anxiety, but it makes me worry). Right now, I have some relationships with such low signal-to-noise ratios that I can really only operate on priors about, broadly speaking, humanity in general. (Discarding these relationships in favour of less bothersome one’s isn’t an option for various reasons.)
I think I’m coming from the position that once you have information about a specific person and a specific relationship, general priors are pretty much useless.
To give a simple example, women are, on the average, shorter than men and that would be my prior about the height of someone before seeing her. But once I see her, the prior is completely superseded by the concrete information that I now have.
In the same way when evaluating whether someone specific is likely to change his/her opinion of me, I will rely almost completely on my knowledge of that particular person and not on generic priors.
Well… I wouldn’t worry too much about what’s “normal”, though I’ll point out that e.g. the mainstream picture of women paints them as very emotionally labile in sexually-charged situation.
You might also consider that you are being played games with. Might be for control (to keep you off-balance) or might be just for fun—some people like drama.
Well, maybe the only wisdom to be had here is really that if you don’t have much more than priors to go on, tough luck, nothing you can do, live with the uncertainty and hope for the best (because actively asking for evidence is too costly). It’s likely that this this doesn’t bother you as much as me because you’re just better at reading social cues; however the hell one is supposed to learn that, especially if one is an introvert and experiences a consequent poverty of stimulus.
Although sometimes it’s not even about observing clues. For example, one might know that it’s likely that one will at some point behave in some way that the other person would view unfavorably; and you want to estimate how much you should invest in this relationship. Then the only relevant evidence you can get is how this person behaves in dealing with other people.
Depends on who you’re talking to, my reply would be along the lines of “cool!”
Presumably not a sincere reply...?
Imagine a situation where Bob asks Dave: Dave? Why didn’t you come to my birthday party on Monday? Dave replies: “Monday I was busy torturing kittens.”
In most cases, if someone would tell me that they torture kittens in their spare time I first impulse wouldn’t be to conclude that they are actually torturing kittens.
The kind of person who can openly joke about torturing kittens in their spare time is likely high confidence. In some social contexts that joke will still get you looked down upon. Knowing what kind of jokes are acceptable and having the ability to push to that limit demonstrates social savviness.
Okay, here’s a better one: If the subject of sex comes up, just say “Haha I’m actually a pedophile, though, soo....” Avoid laughing, or even smiling, and maintain expectant eye contact until they respond. If they ask whether you’re joking then make an expression like you’re about to cry, and then leave the conversation.
Bam, person has an extremely negative opinion of you :)