Discuss what is meant by a snap judgment and provide an example of when you made one.
Snap-Judgment Science
You’ve spent hours preparing for the job interview. You’ve tried to anticipate everything your potential new employers may ask you. You think hard about every detail: Remember to sit up straight, look them in the eye, give a firm handshake, tell them what they want to hear.
But despite all the effort you spend trying to make a good impression, the interview might be over the second the recruiters first lay eyes on you.
Before we can finish blinking our eyes, we’ve already decided whether we want to hire, date, hate, or make friends with a person we’re encountering for the first time. These first impressions color the way we interact with other people from that point forward. And all of this happens outside of our awareness, in the unconscious processes of the mind, research shows.
The human tendency to, as the old idiom says, judge a book by its cover, has become a source of extensive psychological study. The science of snap judgments is more than just figuring out what we can tell by looking at each
other. Knowing how people size each other up from day to day has significant implications for identifying and subduing implicit bias, discrimination, and stereotyping.
Whether we’re selecting a cashier at a grocery store or picking players for a neighborhood ball game, we go through a detailed and complicated process of noticing cues that give away other people’s traits, and then we unconsciously run a series of calculations to make predictions about how they might act.
Even in cases where we already have a lot of information, a snap judgment overpowers decision making. Billions of dollars are spent annually across the globe to advance political campaigns. Voters and the media scrutinize a candidate’s platform, voting record, experience, and qualifications. But studies have shown that when we step into the voting booth, the candidate’s face drives our decision. In a study published in 2005, students at Princeton University were shown photos of candidates from the last three US Congressional races. As each pair of candidates came up on the computer screen, the students were asked to judge who looked more competent.
