Facial first impressions are not mandatory: A priming investigation

A common assertion is that, based around prominent character traits, first impressions are spontaneously extracted from faces. Specifically, mere exposure to a person is sufficient to trigger the involuntary extraction of core personality characteristics (e.g., trustworthiness, dominance, competence), an outcome that supports a range of significant judgments (e.g., hiring, investing, electing). But is this in fact the case? Noting ambiguities in the extant literature, here we used a repetition priming procedure to probe the extent to which impressions of dominance are extracted from faces absent the instruction to evaluate the stimuli in this way. Across five experiments in which either the character trait of interest was made increasingly obvious to participants (Expts. 1-3) or attention was explicitly directed toward the faces to generate low-level/high-level judgments (Expts. 4 & 5), no evidence for the spontaneous extraction of first impressions was observed. Instead, priming only emerged when judgments of dominance were an explicit requirement of the task at hand. Thus, at least using a priming methodology, the current findings contest the notion that first impressions are a mandatory product of person perception.