Lecture 1 - First Impressions

It is said that "you never get a second chance to make a first impression". Today we were told that it only takes up to as little as 17 seconds for someone to make their first impression on another. In my opinion people are usually judged through four main attributes: character, visual perception, mannerisms and most importantly their body language.

At the beginning of the lesson Ruth asked the class to draw an individual shape on a piece of paper, big enough so that we could write our responses in from her questions. All the questions were fairly basic and were asking us to describe the main focal points of our life and a little bit about us as people. For example one of the first questions was “how many brothers and sisters do you have?”. Everyone had the option to either write their response down or to draw it as a picture; I drew a picture of two boys and three girls to indicate my answer. Once the class had answered the questions Ruth collected everyone’s paper in and handed them out to random people making sure we didn’t get our own one back. The idea of this activity was for whoever received the piece of paper to write down what ‘kind of person’ they thought we were and with these thoughts hand the piece of paper back to who they best suited (even though we didn’t really know one another). As my star was handed instantly to me the words wrote on the back were “she’s: confident, funny, outgoing and sporty”. This seemed like a perfect observation of my persona. It seems somewhat surreal, that we as people can be instantly identified by a few words or pictures on a piece of paper. [Add Picture of my Star]

Our next activity involved judging two random students on their appearance; they were not allowed to talk to us as we had to judge them solely on their looks. At first it seemed unfair to stereotype someone especially as we hadn't met them before or didn’t know them, but it was all part of the activity. As both the participants walked into the room, everyone was to write down their initial thoughts on a piece of paper on each person. Instantly I perceived participant A to be: a student, have a big personality (because of her bright clothing), into rock music and be fairly confident. On the other hand participant B seemed to be: a student, foreign, shy, reserved and really into fashion. After about five minutes everyone had gathered their thoughts and was ready for a group discussion. Surprisingly most of the class had the same thoughts as I had, in distinguishing the fact that both of the students were defiantly of another nationality. It's strange how our visual perceptions of both participant A and B was practically spot on as they were exactly as we had all described them.