Two Harvard psychologists, Nalini Ambadi and Robert Rosenthal, conducted a particularly convincing experiment. Ambadi first wanted to investigate the factors that affect teacher performance. She suggested that the non-verbal features of the behavior of teachers, «body language» — postures, gestures, would be important factors influencing the assessment of effectiveness. To test this hypothesis, video recordings of lectures by Harvard professors were used. She was going to turn off the sound and show these «silent» recordings to a group of viewers who did not know the teachers, so that they could evaluate the effectiveness of their work.
Ambadi needed one-minute videos, unfortunately, this was not taken into account when filming. On the videos, the teachers interacted with the students, which was a problem, because the students who appeared in the videos could subconsciously influence the viewers’ opinion of the teachers. Ambadi met with her supervisor and told him that it didn’t seem to work out. Then Ambadi looked at the tapes one more time and came to the conclusion that it is still possible to prepare a 10-second clip for each of the teachers, in which there will be no students. The experiment was built on these short video clips. After reviewing them, the audience evaluated each of the teachers according to fifteen parameters.
Well, if you need to form an opinion about someone based on a ten-second video clip, you can do it. Although it is unlikely that you will attach too much importance to such an assessment.
Ambadi repeated the same experiment with even shorter 5-second video clips of the same teachers. They were judged by another group of spectators. The estimates of the second group, within the limits of the permissible statistical error, coincided with the estimates of the first group, which watched 10-second clips.
After that, Ambadi gave another group of viewers 2-second clips of the same teachers to watch. Ratings again turned out to be almost the same as in the previous two cases.
But what was really amazing was this: Ambadi compared the ratings of the video clips with the ratings given by students who attended a full semester of lectures by the same teachers. Naturally, these students knew the teachers much better than the viewers who watched the short «silent» video clips. However, the ratings matched again. So, the opinion of people who did not know the teachers at all and watched only a “silent” 2-second video was almost the same as the opinion of students who studied with the assessed teachers for a whole semester.
It seemed that people very quickly form an opinion about those they first see during the first two seconds of communication, and this opinion has nothing to do with what this person says. Very rarely, something that happens after those first two seconds can significantly change the first impression.”