The One About My Friend, the Musician, and First Impressions

When I began thinking about personal experiences relating to first impressions, what immediately popped into my head had nothing to do with me and everything to do with my best friend and an unfortunately absent musician. It is an incident that made me laugh then because of how wrong of an impression my best friend got from the musician, whom I knew from a psychology class. It makes me laugh even more so know because it is a perfect example of how powerful first impressions can be, and of how concepts like belief perseverance and primacy effect play out in real life.

The primacy effect being the idea that people greatly use the information they are given early on when forming an impression of a person, and largely ignore later information, even if it is important (Asch, 1946). Furthermore, belief perseverance is the, arguably stubborn, refusal to let go of current beliefs, even if those beliefs have been negated (Anderson, Lepper, & Ross, 1980).

Back to my best friend and the no-show musician, the story goes that my best friend was trying to set up a fundraising concert on campus for one of her favorite organizations. The musician she contacted was a well known one on campus, so my friend was hoping the popular musician would bring a big crowd to the concert. Email conversations took place, and it looked like it was all going to work out. Come to the first concert meeting, the musician never shows up and later emails that they were too busy to come to the meeting. They subsequently miss every other meeting my friend holds, so my friend scratches the musicians name off the performance list and begins forming a bad impression of the busy musician. Jump to the day before the concert, my friend receives an email from the musician asking when and where they would be performing, which sends my friend over the edge. She writes a sickeningly sweet email to the musician about since they never showed up to any of the meetings, she would not be needing their services at the concert. After that exchange, my friend permanently writes the musician off as being every negative quality she can think of, and never looks back.

The next semester, the musician was in one of my classes, and I was able to learn more about them. Though I tried time and time again to change my friend's mind about the musician, she wouldn't budge. No matter how many good things I had to say about the musician, my friend would find something bad to say. I would talk about how smart the musician was in class, and my friend would just roll her eyes.

This story illustrates the concepts primacy effects and belief perseverance. That is, my friend based her impression of the musician on the first few bits of information she received about the musician, which was they could be somewhat unreliable and presumptuous, and largely ignored any later information she learned (primacy effect). Furthermore, she refused to change her belief that the musician was a rude person even when she was given information about the musician being a nice and smart person (belief perseverance).

Sadly, the musician no longer goes to our university, so my friend will never have the chance to personally get to know the musician better and maybe change her opinion on them. Although, I doubt she would take the opportunity even if it was available.

Anderson, C. A., Lepper, M. R, & Ross, L. (1980). The perseverance of social theories: The role of explanation in the persistence of discredited information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1037-1049.

Asch, S.E. (1946). Forming impressions of personality. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41(3), 258-290.