Warm and Cold Impressions

   First impressions are notoriously susceptible to misperception. Soon after World War II, Solomon Asch did a simple but provocative study on first impressions and found that people tend to leap to conclusions with blinding speed and few cues to guide them. He first described a man as "intelligent, skillful, industrious, warm, determined, practical, and cautious." The people who heard this brief description had no trouble painting in the rest of the personality. They assumed he was also honest, good-natured, wise, popular, sociable, and imaginative - an all-around good fellow. In retrospect, I could imagine a friendly cat burglar with the same traits that Asch listed, but the subjects apparently could not.

   Asch wondered how small changes in the list of traits might affect the impression the man was making, so in variations of the same experiment he read the list again to other groups, substituting cold, polite, or blunt for the single word warm. Neither polite nor blunt changed the impression very much, but when the man turned cold, he was transformed into a very unlikable fellow. He became an unpopular, disagreeable, cheapskate. The change in his psychological temperature was the step in the recipe that turned Dr. Jeckyll into Mr. Hyde.

   Warm and cold say a great deal about our dispositions and influence how others will react to us in social settings. They are heavily weighted central traits when people are forming a first impression. You may be considered brilliant and industrious, but these will pale next to your warmth or coldness.