It is an early cool morning in central Johannesburg. Picture the fancy foyer meeting place of mostly strangers, arriving for a day conference. They are dressed up in corporate apparel, checked in, labelled and issued with the umpteenth name tag and branded folder clutched under arm. The non-smokers pivot to the drinks table for coffee, tea, water or juice.
First impressions, we all know, last. And nowhere is this more important than in the corporate world of networking. Neurobiologist David Linden and author of the book Touch: The Science of Hand, Heart and Mind, chose such a corporate setting to research first impressions.
In a classic experiment, people were holding either a cold or a hot drink when meeting someone. Those with a hot drink literally rated the people they met as warmer — as in, having a more pro-social personality. They didn’t rate them better overall as smarter, or more competent — they just rated them as warmer.
“Incidental touch can help form our impressions of people’s character,” Linden believes. In another study people evaluated others’ resumes on a clipboard. If the papers were on a heavy clipboard, rather than a light one, they were rated as having more authority. Once again, people didn’t think they were smarter, or better team players, or things like that. The weight made them seem weighty.”
This points to an idea in social psychology that seems to prove that when people evaluate someone for the first time, the first subconscious questions they ask are:
- Is this a friend or foe?
- Is this person warm?
- Is he or she a threat?
“The second thing that comes under scrutiny is whether the other person is competent — which means that it matters if they’re a threat or not. And it seems that touch information helps us make these distinctions, even when it’s irrelevant,” Linden says.
Next time you arrive at a corporate gathering, choose your drink and your clipboard wisely – and decide if you want to appear as a friend or a foe…
