Nonverbal cues-based first impressions: Impression formation through exposure to static images

The extant research on static images has focused on judgments of personality and character traits (e.g., honesty, intelligence, health, etc.). Our research is the first, to our knowledge, to examine the accuracy of judgments of an unknown target’s job performance made on the basis of static images.

The photographs used in this research contain physical appearance cues (of which general physical attractiveness is one element) and static representations of some kinesic cues (facial expression and eye gaze).

All photographs and performance measures used were obtained with permission from the targets.

To ensure true thin-slice judgments, participants in each study were also asked if they had ever seen or met the target before the study. No participants indicated that they had seen or met the targets before.

The reader may note that some relatively large correlations in Tables 1 and 2 are not statistically significant. This is because, following Ambady and Rosenthal (1993), targets are used as the unit of analysis rather than judges (participants). Because correlations were computed across judges, study 1A has an n of five targets (financial consultants) and study 1B an n of six targets (professors) vs an n corresponding to the number of participants. This analysis resulted in three degrees of freedom in the financial consultant study and four degrees of freedom in the professor study. The critical value for r at three degrees of freedom (at the p < 0.05 level) is a correlation of 0.878. The critical value for r at four degrees of freedom (at the p < 0.05 level) is .811.

Both Cohen’s d (reported in the text) and r ² (reported in Tables 1 and 2) are indicators of the large effect sizes found in both studies 1A and 1B.

Although the paragraph was originally used by Srull and Wyer (1979) in a category accessibility study, we elected to use it here because it was designed to be ambiguous in regards to a specific personality trait. Because the target’s purported actions in the paragraph can be interpreted as either hostile or not, judgments made by participants of the target’s hostility are primarily influenced by the perceivers’ initial nonverbal cues-based impression rather than by cues in the written paragraph.