新的研究發現，第一印象很難被改變。但好消息是，人們的快速判斷往往是準確的。

兩項新研究的結果表明，人們對某人先入為主的初步判斷很難發生改變。

研究中要求測試者們先看一個人的照片，然后預先判斷如果跟這個人發生互動會有怎樣的感覺。一個多月后，測試者們同照片中的人進行了互動，結果之前的預測驚人的準確。

多倫多大學的心理學家想知道，當事先知道的信息跟他們相互了解之后的新發現發生沖突時會怎樣。為了找到這個問題的答案，研究者們對現實生活中的同性戀行為進行了研究。一般來說，人們可以通過觀察一個人的臉來判斷他到底是不是同性戀，而且準確率高達65%。

研究人員要求測試者看男同性戀和異性戀的照片。照片中有一半被貼上正確性取向的標簽。另外一半標簽確實錯的，也就是說，照片是直男卻貼的同性戀，反之亦然。接下來測試者們必須做個電腦測試，根據標簽回憶照片上的人是同性戀還是異性戀。結果是他們真的知道每個人正確的性取向。

實驗的重點是人們觀察人臉所需要的時間。僅憑20秒觀察人臉便斷定性取向的人更有可能是靠著直覺做出判斷。這意味著他們會猜出跟標簽相反的真實性取向。用時過久的答案則可能來自標簽。

在第二個實驗中，研究人員對可信與不可信的面孔做了測試。照片相對應的標簽描述的是類似在醫院做志愿者這種靠得住的行為或是像偷竊這種靠不住的行為。人們記住相匹配的面孔和行為要比記住不匹配的面孔和行為容易得多，但是人們對面孔的記憶能力顯然比對行為的記憶能力強。研究結果表明，每一次看到一個人時，對這些人最初的快速判斷將會再次出現。

First impressions are hard to dislodge, new research finds. The good news is that people's snap judgments about others tend to be accurate.

Two new studies presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in Austin, Texas, reveal that people both have a hard time getting over the first thing they know about someone, and that they're actually pretty good at judging a book by its cover.

"Despite the well-known idiom to 'not judge a book by its cover,' the present research shows that such judgments about the cover are good proxies for judgments about the book — even after reading it," Vivian Zayas, a psychologist at Cornell University, said in a statement.

Zayas and her colleagues asked participants to view a photograph of a person and make a snap judgment about how he or she would feel about that person if they interacted.

More than a month later, the participant and the person in the photo did actually interact. People's predictions of how much they'd like the person in the photo were surprisingly accurate, Zayas and her colleagues report.

On the other hand, no one can be right about everything. Psychologist Nicholas Rule of the University of Toronto and colleagues wanted to know what happens when initial information about a person conflicts with new discoveries that come out as they get to know each other.

To test the question, the researchers took advantage of real-life gaydar: On average, people are able, with about 65 percent accuracy, to tell from a person's face whether they are gay or straight.

The researchers asked participants to look at pictures of both gay and straight men. In half of cases, the photos were labeled with the person's correct sexual orientation. In the other half, the label was wrong, saying that a straight man was gay or vice versa.

Next, the participants had to take a computer quiz, correctly recalling whether each man was gay or straight, according to the labels. They saw each face come up on screen and had to answer correctly for every single photograph three times. If they made a single mistake, they had to start all over again.

"By the end, they really knew who was gay and who was straight," Rule told Live Science.

The twist, Rule said, was that the participants were given different amounts of time to see the faces in the quiz section. Some went through the pictures at their own pace; others had as little as a 20th of a second, the amount of time it takes people to judge sexual orientation from a face alone.

People who saw the faces for only a 20th of a second were more likely to go with their gut feeling on the person's sexuality — meaning they were likely to guess the person's real orientation instead of what the false labels said. People who had all the time they needed were more likely to answer according to the labels.

In a second experiment, the researchers replicated the findings with trustworthy and untrustworthy faces, matched with labels describing either trustworthy behavior like volunteering at a hospital or untrustworthy behavior like stealing. People remember untrustworthy faces and untrustworthy behavior better than they recall goodie-two-shoes, but the memory boost for the faces is stronger than for the behavior, Rule and his colleagues found.

The findings suggest that every time an individual sees another person, their initial snap judgments of them re-emerge, Rule said.

"Their face is a constant reminder to us of that initial impression," he said. With more time, people recover their knowledge of what they learned about the person, but first impressions remain very important and seem not to fade, he added.

Other research has found that teachers who are introduced to certain students with assurances that these children will bloom by the end of the year focus more attention on those kids, essentially creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teachers also prefer students who are more attractive, and attractiveness predicts success in life.

"It goes to show that perhaps the opportunities that one gets in life can be very much shaped by one's face," Rule said.

（來源：www.livescience.com 編輯：丹妮）