The impact of social learning on first impressions across development

First impressions play a prominent role in guiding human decision-making. Impressions from faces, in particular, demonstrate the ability to influence voting decisions, criminal sentencing outcomes and leadership opportunities. Given the wide-ranging outcomes of first impressions, a significant amount of research has attempted to investigate their origins and development. One of the most prominent views in the field is that first impressions are governed by an innate mechanism, able to account for the early development, automaticity and speed of first impressions. The aim of my doctoral studies was to explore alternative accounts of the origins of first impressions. Specifically, across three empirical chapters I investigate the potential role of social learning on the formation and maintenance of first impressions. The results of the empirical work in Chapter 2 highlighted the plausibility of social learning as one route to first impressions. Results showed that impressions from culturally learned cues share characteristics of impressions from physical cues in their automaticity, speed and early development (by 6 years of age). Chapters 3 & 4 went on to explore how consistent first impressions may emerge early in development. Chapter 3 demonstrates the ease with which children, from at least 5 years of age, can use the non-verbal behaviour of others to infer traits such as niceness. Traits which were then transferred to a similar looking, but novel, target. Chapter 4 highlights the potential for parent-child conversations to facilitate the formation of face-trait mappings. Both parents and children made trait inferences when discussing faces, without explicit instruction to do so, with parents actively reinforcing their children’s face-trait mappings. The potential role of social learning in the formation and maintenance of first impressions is discussed as well as possible avenues for future research.