Am I working against the grain? Or is it just that I’m getting older? Unable to assimilate new situations quickly enough to form a useful opinion? I’d rather think of it as the wisdom of Age, but, of course, I would think that, wouldn’t I? And yet, the realization that first impressions are often premature impressions is something only acquired through experience, I suppose, because it’s difficult to shed the initial suspicion that you may have discovered something really important.
I’m pretty sure I have never formed friends like that -friendship (as opposed to acquaintanceship) is acquired slowly, and over time. And as to something akin to ‘love at first sight’, I can only say that for those kinds of feelings to last -at least on my part- they have to be reciprocated. That, too, takes time. ‘Attraction at first sight’ is another thing altogether, though -it is more superficial, and probably less demanding. Love is a deep -dare I say, spiritual– thing, whereas I think attraction sits more tenuously on the rather slippery surface of our attention.
Still, I recognize that as the years slowly thicken around me, they may have dampened the restless partner-seeking vibrissae to which younger, thinner skin is so exposed. I’m not sure that I am completely disqualified, but at least my muffled needs have allowed me time to reflect before deciding -to breathe, before seeking to envelop…
And yet, I remain curious, if not vicariously attracted to the issue of first impressions, so I just had to read the BBC story that promised to unwrap it like a bedtime story from long ago: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190401-is-there-such-a-thing-as-love-at-first-sight
In an essay for BBC by William Park, he writes that ‘There is evidence that we are able to make an assessment of someone’s attractiveness in the blink of an eye, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that those assessments are accurate… It takes less than 1/10th of a second to form an assessment of someone’s face. These first impressions predict all kinds of important characteristics, not just attractiveness.’ And, ‘These impressions we make in a split second are not random; they tend to be shared by the majority of the people surveyed. But it doesn’t necessarily make them correct. “A first impression could be misleading,” says professor Alexander Todorov [an academic at Princeton University]… “We only make first impressions about strangers. So naturally they are superficial.”’
‘Whether our predictions are accurate or not, we make them quickly and we stick to them. Even if we are given more time than 1/10th of a second to judge the attractiveness of a face, we are unlikely to arrive at a different conclusion… There are three universal qualities that people infer from a face: attractiveness, trustworthiness and dominance. Evolutionarily, this makes sense. Attractiveness is a mating cue, trustworthiness implies useful social characteristics, like being able to care for children, and assessing dominance is useful to avoid conflict.’
So far, so good, I suppose -if a bit reductionist. But the essay goes on to suggest that we prejudge facial photos using the same categories and ‘portraits taken from a low angle are more likely to be judged as dominant, which is positive for men and negative for women. Whereas the reverse is seen in portraits taken from a high angle.’ -so, my first clue as to what kind of picture to put on a dating site, I guess. But there is a catch: ‘In dating apps, it is a case of love at second sight. When asked to rate the attractiveness of potential partners, if the preceding face was attractive you are more likely to rate the next face as attractive and vice versa.’
Well, that confirms my suspicion that online first impressions are such stuff as dreams are made on. ‘First impressions are rapid but shallow and mutable if you have better information.’ You have to talk to somebody, engage with them to sustain something more than a passing interest. And then, of course, it is no longer a ‘first’ impression. But, I’m only reiterating what Todorov believes: ‘“The only way to tell whether two people will really like each other – they have to talk. People don’t make good predictions for compatibility without talking,” says Professor Todorov.’
Uhmm… I have to say that I began to lose interest at that point. I began to wonder, as I pointed out earlier, whether the essay was more about attraction, than love. It’s easy to get them mixed up in the soup of hormones in which we swim. In many ways, the article was a ‘how to’ for the young and restless. I was more intrigued by something Park points out in the dying embers of his article when he quotes a professor of psychology from California State University, Los Angeles, Karen Wu. ‘Wu studies dating behaviours in Asian-American communities who put a different emphasis on certain values… “Western cultures value individual goals more than group goals. Collectivistic cultures might value niceness more because you’re interested in group benefits rather than individual benefits.”
In other words, ‘Considering this, it is a miracle that we ever find someone who is as attracted to us as we are to them. The conversation your potential partner had directly before meeting you, their general mood, their cultural background, the angle at which they are looking at you, whether they deem themselves to be more popular than you – all these factors could influence whether you hit it off seems endless.’
So, is it any wonder that Age seems like a vacation at the cottage? No compulsion to drive somewhere, and then get up the next day and drive someplace else. No need to worry about the angle from which you take your selfies, or whether the next individual who wanders past is judging you by the standards of the person with whom they last talked.
These all seem like minor things in the bigger picture, and yet they loom large in the quest for partnership, I suppose. Attractiveness, trustworthiness and dominance -is that what we’re expected -okay, designed– to glean from the first glance without even needing to break the ice with a smile or a kind word? Biologic atavisms, if you ask me… although I am seldom canvassed for that kind of opinion anymore. I’m not sure why.
