raleighnet.org

There is a ton of really interesting information in Malcolm Gladwell’s article, The New-Boy Network - What do job interviews really tell us?. It starts a bit slow, but keep reading as it quickly gets to some great stuff.

Choice bit:

The observers, presented with a ten-second silent video clip, had no difficulty rating the teachers on a fifteen- item checklist of personality traits. In fact, when Ambady cut the clips back to five seconds, the ratings were the same. They were even the same when she showed her raters just two seconds of videotape. That sounds unbelievable unless you actually watch Ambady’s teacher clips, as I did, and realize that the eight seconds that distinguish the longest clips from the shortest are superfluous: anything beyond the first flash of insight is unnecessary. When we make a snap judgment, it is made in a snap. It’s also, very clearly, a judgment: we get a feeling that we have no difficulty articulating.

Ambady’s next step led to an even more remarkable conclusion. She compared those snap judgments of teacher effectiveness with evaluations made, after a full semester of classes, by students of the same teachers. The correlation between the two, she found, was astoundingly high. A person watching a two-second silent video clip of a teacher he has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who sits in the teacher’s class for an entire semester.

We’ve all heard the old chestnut about never getting a second chance to make a first impression, but that seems remarkable to me. I’m assuming that 2 seconds of silent video isn’t enough to form a valid impression of competency, but then I’m left with a deeper question. Do we ever really know anybody? How much time do you have to spend with somebody before the weight of evidence overrides that initial impression?