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When it comes to person perception, does one ‘‘judge a book by its cover?’’ We like to think that once we get to know a person, their physical appearance would no longer affect how much we like them. But recent work by Gul Gunaydin, Vivian Zayas, and Emre Selcuk published in the Journal Social Psychological and Personality Science provides evidence to the contrary. The authors show that judgments based on simply viewing a portrait photograph are strong predictors of judgments following a 20 minute in-depth face-to-face interaction with the same person that takes place one to six months later. The only information available in both portrait photographs and live interactions is the facial appearance of the target person. So, the consistency between photograph- and interaction-based judgments that was observed in the study provides evidence that judgments cued by facial appearance appreciably influence judgments in a live interaction. These findings suggest that even when we try to get to know unknown others as much as possible—as is common in many interview settings and getting-acquainted interactions—we do not completely revise our initial impressions and rely on facial appearance to form our judgments. In other words, even after having read a book, we still, to some extent, judge it by its cover.

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This page is a summary of: Impressions Based on a Portrait Predict, 1-Month Later, Impressions Following a Live Interaction, Social Psychological and Personality Science, September 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1948550616662123.
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