A friend that I have known for over 10 years just had cataract surgery. They cut into the eye, liquify and suck out the lens and replace it. Piece of cake. No more corrective glasses needed which he wore all his remembered life. This not only changes his life, it also changed his face. He looks very unlike before which started me thinking about faces and how they affect how we view people. 
I remember that I instantly liked him when we first met just based of his facial expression. As they say, whoever “They” is, first impressions are important, and you don’t get a second chance at a first impression. I would tell my imaging service students a long time ago that they should not disqualify themselves with their appearance. They would complain when I said they needed to dress well for service calls.
So, back to the faces. I began to explore why we form such apparently instant judgements based on people’s faces. There is much about this on the Internet and I am too lazy to read all the research so I will just do what I do: Make up my own stuff.
When we first see or meet anyone, we tend to instantly make a judgement regarding things like their attractiveness, intelligence, openness, health, friendliness, etc. We do this even of people in airports and restaurants. We do not need to actually meet anyone to begin putting them into their special cubbyholes.
Although we are told to look others in the eye and smile warmly when we first meet others, we take in an instant impression from the overall face. We immediately, and maybe unconsciously, make judgments. Do we like or dislike? Trust or not? These impressions influence the initial behavior we implement toward these people. It then becomes a progression of proving or disproving our initial impression. Have you ever been surprised that your first impression of someone was wrong?
Have you ever looked at someone and immediately liked or disliked them? Does she resemble a favorite aunt or an unpleasant previous boss? We use information stored in memory as a short cut to making judgments about people and situations. Imagine if we had to research and analyze every new encounter with people or situations. This would be extremely time consuming and exhausting. As humans, we must make assumptions even though they may not always be reasonable.
In the “Ladder of Inference,” postulated by psychologist Chris Argyris (Google it), he provides a format for the process we go through in arriving at conclusions and acting upon them. Since we are always presented with such a large quantity of available and observable information, we must be selective of what we use. We may select the look of the eyes and the mouth or the entire shape of the face. We then project our own experiences onto that selected information.
We might think “She looks like Aunt Josie.” We then make a judgement that since she looks like Josie, and we love Josie because she is kind and good to us, this person must be someone we can also like. We have made an assumption and conclusion and even acted on the information we selected. The similarity in appearance of the faces is enough initially. Someone else observing and selecting the same information would probably come to a different conclusion based on her experiences. Initially, I like her and you don’t. With time you like her, and I don’t.
As for my friend, the surprise is that the lack of glasses changed his appearance from an analytical person to an extroverted person. I’m not changing my initial impression because that was replaced a long time ago by experience.
Regarding my face, if you knew me a long time ago when I was very good looking, you might be surprised by the addition of a few wrinkles. The wrinkles are a sign that I have become even better looking, however there was not enough room to get it all in without them.
– Manny Roman, CRES, is association business operations manager at Association of Medical Service Providers.
