From photograph to face-to-face: Brief interactions change person and personality judgments

Research into ‘first impressions’ frequently uses photographs of faces as representations of unknown others. This is the case for legitimate concerns about standardisation, sample size and experimental control. However, there is little work investigating the robustness of these first impressions through first interactions. A sample of 97 pairs of stranger participants (N= 194) completed personality measures (of Big Five and Triarchic Model of Psychopathy), made personality and social judgments of a photograph of the face of their to-be partner, then engaged in five minutes (maximum) of unstructured interaction with their partner and then made their judgments again. The behaviour of the participants in the interaction was coded using 76 criteria. Generally, before and after judgments were correlated, but significantly different at Time 2. Personality judgment accuracy at Time 1 was poor overall but at Time 2 participants showed self-other agreement on Neuroticism, Extraversion and psychopathic Boldness. At Time 1 participant ratings of confidence were more similar to negative valence but at Time 2 confidence was a positive attribute. Coded behaviours related to ‘engagement’ were those that influenced the person judgments the most, and these were related to Extraversion, Agreeableness and Boldness of participants. Overall, the results of this study show that first personality and person judgments change from photographs to face-to-face interaction. Person judgment research should be aware of the extent to which judgments of photographs relate to first interaction.