First impressions are impactful. Research in psychology suggests such impressions can last for months (Gunaydin, Selcuk, & Zayas, 2017) and affect personal judgements despite knowledge of existing evidence to the contrary of the formed belief (Rydell & McConnell, 2006). This is something novelists have often illustrated. As Dostoevsky writes in Crime and Punishment:

“We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.”

Looking at the neural correlates of these impressions, a part of this 'first judgement' phenomena can be attributed to activity in the amygdala. The amygdala is an area of the brain often popularised as ‘the centre for fear’. Whilst this is vaguely true, its function is more nuanced†. It is more accurate to think of the amygdala as an area of the brain that governs threat detection. In more recent work it has been found that the amygdala is responsible for an array of human emotional experiences (LeDoux, 1998), whilst also being active in a host of different situations, not just those we perceive to be life threatening. These include situations associated with existing friendships and the cultivation of new friendships (Janak & Tye, 2015). Regarding judgements, in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies it was found that within a split second of visual perception the amygdala of those under the scan activated in response to an unfamiliar face. In testing for inherent degrees of racial bias, this occurred for faces that had a different skin tone. This was irrespective of a person’s racial beliefs (Sahakian & Gottwald, 2017). Other studies have shown that this amygdala response is automatic and rapid, occurring well before a person is consciously aware of making any judgement (Phelps et al., 2000). These early neural responses are also not strongly correlated with explicit attitudes, indicating that people can sincerely endorse egalitarian beliefs yet still exhibit fast, threat-related activation in response to social cues (Cunningham et al., 2004). Such automatic responses are not only outside of our immediate control, but they can bias subsequent judgements, influencing trust, warmth, or threat perception within fractions of a second. In many cases, this initial neural ‘verdict’ proves to be wrong, revealing how unreliable first impressions can be.

Another key brain region related to first impressions is the hippocampus. The hippocampus is critical for the encoding and consolidation of both declarative and episodic memory. In a nutshell, it stores the details of new experiences (the consolidation of memories occurs whilst we sleep). When the amygdala flags an emotionally salient stimulus, such as an unfamiliar face that it could perceive as a threat, it modulates hippocampal activity, strengthening the memory trace (Phelps, 2004). This explains why first impressions are often so vivid and emotionally laden: at the level of the brain, a large interconnected wave of neurones fire in these distinct regions to create memories intentionally made to last. A fleeting impression can be stored with a disproportionate weight, as the amygdala–hippocampal interaction has created an emotionally tagged event (Murty et al., 2010). Our judgement of someone (and the formation of this judgement) is therefore drawn not just on the objective evidence presented to us, but on the emotionally charged memory of that first interaction of a few seconds. As previously mentioned, the psychology literature reveals that first impressions have a very strong and lasting impact on who you think a person is. Couple this psychology with the relevant neuroscience on amygdala-hippocampal interaction, both key to the formation of memories, a picture starts to emerge on how judgement, be it racial bias or other, becomes ingrained in a persons mind.

Our brains, however, possess the remarkable ability to rewire themselves - a property neuroscientists call neuroplasticity. At its simplest, neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s capacity to reorganise its structure and function in response to new experiences, learning, or injury. This occurs at the level of synapses: when certain neural pathways are repeatedly activated, they become strengthened and more efficient, a principle often summarised by the adage taken from Hebbian theory, “neurons that fire together, wire together” (Hebb, 1949). Conversely, pathways that are not used may weaken over time, allowing the brain to allocate resources elsewhere. This adaptability means that a single region is not permanently tied to one fixed function, but can, under the right conditions, take on new roles. For example, those that our blind in most cases still possess the brain region largely responsible for vision, namely, the occipital lobe. However, instead of it being used for vision, the neurones in this region are rewired for other sensory stimulation, such as tactile - required for learning braille. An unfortunate case was documented where a blind woman had a stroke that damaged regions of the occipital lobe. At first this was thought of as fortunate, as her vision was completely impaired from birth and so logically, it would not matter if the occipital region was damaged. However, she could no longer read braille because her neurones and synapses for tactile sensory stimulus had rewired to this region. The damage to her occipital lobe had therefore adversely affected her ability to read braille (Hamilton, Keenan, Catala, & Pascual-Leone, 2000).

With the concept of neuroplasticity in mind, although early impressions can be deeply encoded through amygdala–hippocampal interaction, our ability for neuroplasticity means these judgements are not immutable and can actually change. Neuroplasticity allows for the remapping of neural pathways in response to new experiences, repeated exposures, or deliberate interventions. In practical terms, this means our fast, emotionally charged judgments can be revised over time, though this requires conscious effort and repeated counterevidence. In the same study which tested for racial bias, repeated exposure to the faces in question eventually reduced amygdala activity until it was no longer firing in response to the exposure of a different skin tone.

Judgements will of course vary considerably depending on the person who makes them. This may sound obvious, but the variation can be truly drastic when you take into account a person’s genetic background, their environment and the subsequent epigenetic factors (how certain genes are ‘turned on’ in certain environments and not others), upbringing and social peers. Though I do not like using the term subconscious, because such reasoning can never be falsified (Popper, 1963), it is certainly the case that without our conscious knowledge, we are coming to opinions of people in a matter of seconds that will influence how we think and interact with them. As an aside, from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense that we form such quick decisions. When our ancestry was exposed more frequently to hostile environments, survival became who could react the quickest. This meant the development of fast, almost instantaneous threat detection to the unfamiliar†.

Being conscious of this influence on the view we take of individuals does not necessarily change these judgements. This is why it is important to invest some humility into our judgement. If the roles were reversed and another individual made a judgement we felt was unfavourable or misplaced, we would feel affronted (this is of course skipping over the argument on whether we should care about the opinions of others in the first place - in certain situations it makes sense, in others it does not and only paralyses a person from action). It seems the person has made a judgement based on a very small snapshot of our life.

To the average individual, they have had a whole host of experiences, interests, thoughts, friendships and interactions in the years of their existence which have formed their outlook on life. It would be unfair and equally unjustified to boil their character down to a first impression of a few seconds or minutes. To not judge, or rather, to refrain from indulging in the thoughts these unavoidable judgements generate is to in a way abide by Kant's categorical imperative (Kant, 2005). It is not because it avoids undesirable consequences that we must reconsider our judgements, but because it is right in itself. To not do to others what we wouldn't want done to ourselves defeats the imperative, as that would be contingent on what others desire, when our reasoning must be abstracted from contingency and made out of respect for all that creates our human condition with others. The point is, we must have more caution and consideration before we enact on the path of thinking we have a person’s character figured out. It is a matter of theory of mind - knowing that another human, with the capacity to reason, with relative experiences of importance, is behind the face we see. We must remind ourselves that the self, that ego of ours, interferes with every interaction we take with others, overriding the sense of commonality and camaraderie that we all fundamentally share when navigating our lives. This can be a hard practice to do. As Jung famously said, "thinking is difficult, that is why people judge" (Jung, 1958). Yet for the majority of those who will read this, the difficulty of the task should be surmounted by the individual interest to understand both the power of judgement and how often it is inadequate as a tool to discern a person’s character. I have been inspired by many books, but no author I feel has done more justice to the subject of misjudging a character than Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice. As Austen illustrated with Mr. Darcy, we never really know who a person is.

From the very beginning, from the first moment, I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry. - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 2014 ed.

Mr. Darcy, of course, was being wrongly judged. As the novel unfolds, it becomes clear that beneath the exterior misread by Elizabeth lay a man of decency, reserve, and quiet principle - a person misunderstood from the outset. Perhaps now, with what we understand about the rapid and automatic processes that govern first impressions, we can see a little more of how such misjudgements take shape. Above all, Austen’s line illustrates why we should never, "from the very beginning”, reduce a person to the narrow glimpse of themselves that they reveal in a first encounter. When put in such terms, it seems ludicrous to surmise a person’s character from what is, in most interactions, a fleeting and superficial moment. People conceal so much of who they are, just as we often do in return, and so it is best to reserve our judgement and to not judge what we cannot see. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, we are reminded that it is easy to denounce the evildoer without recognising what Dostoevsky was ultimately pointing towards, that this evil could also be within ourselves (Dostoevsky, 2003). The greatest difficulty, then, is not condemnation but understanding, both for the person and for a greater understanding of ourselves. To suspend our judgement is to create the possibility of seeing another person as they are, rather than through the distortions of our own prejudice. It is in this pause that the chains of preconception can begin to fall away. Our impressions may be governed by neuronal underpinnings, but the choice of how we act upon them is a deeply human one. Literature, and in many ways neuroscience, reminds us that the surface never reveals the whole.

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*This multifunctional aspect of the amygdala is a property for many brain regions. Our brain is an interconnected system and so different regions of our brain will serve multiple functions. In neuroscience, whilst it is helpful to think of brain areas as regional districts that have specific functions, really it is whole networks that communicate in specific neural patterns to bring about an emotion or experience. The areas of the brain should not be thought of in the same way as organs of the body. It is only because the level of complexity in the brain is so great that in order to visualise and understand it, we must compartmentalise it (perhaps you have read in popular neuroscience books or heard in podcasts that the human brain is the most complex known object and this remains true. Think about the magnitude of effort to understand this object, in relation to all the other known complexities in the natural sciences).

†I acknowledge this is a “just-so” evolutionary argument in the sense described by Gould & Lewontin - a plausible but speculative story rather than a rigorously evidenced account (Gould & Lewontin, 1979).

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