First impressions tell a lot about people. Do you agree or disagree? |
People might say that first impressions are important in a various situations such as in job interview and many other meetings. So they are trying to look more attractive, sometimes disguise themselves to look different from others. I think this is false imformation about him or her, so first impressions are not essential part of people even though they can give small amount of information about him or her. In addition, we human beings have so complex minds and many situational factors influence people psycologically and physically.
To begin with, I've had a valuable experience concerning first impressions. To illustrate, I have been interviewing many teachers because I am an owner of language institute in Korea. At first, I thought that first impressions are important, so I picked up teachers based on first impressions. However, over times, I started to feel that first impressions were mere physical appreance. I have seen many teachers who hadn't good first impressions but they have done their work much more excellent than I expected. On the other hand, I have observed the opposite cases many times. The teacher who had a excellent impression, in fact, turned out to be no more than a normal teacher.
Second, human beings have so complex minds that we can not decide the quality of humans simply based on first impressions. For example, in my language institute, I promoted a peron to a high position to replace someone for a short time. I thought that that promotion was just temporal and transitional steps, so I didn't care much about his performances. However, he was doing his work perfectly and I was really surprised and was ahamed of my ignorance of people's potentials. I think peole have much more potentials than we can imagine, so we can not tell it with first impressions. Humans have potentials based on social context, which can improve potentials or deteriorate them.
To sum up, I admit that when we meet someone, it is unavoidable to judge him with first impressions. However, we need to think it over again when we judge a person. How much can we know the ability of a person with mere first impressions? How much will we be able to recognize the person's potentials with only 10 or 20 minutes' interview? I think human beings are too complicated to know in a shot time. |