First impressions are impactful. Research in psychology suggests such impressions can last for months1 and affect personal judgements despite knowledge of existing evidence to the contrary of the formed belief2. 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 experiences3. It is also 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 friendships4.
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).
Our brains also possess the remarkable ability of rewiring. This is due to what neuroscientists term 'neuroplasticity'. This means that in some cases, depending on the individual, a brain region might be encoded for a different task. 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. A 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.5.
Let’s go back to the amygdala. 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 beliefs6. As previously mentioned, the psychology literature reveals that first impressions have a very strong and lasting impact on who you think a person is. Coupled with the relevant neuroscience on amygdala activation and hippocampal activation, both key to the formation of memories, a picture starts to emerge on how racial bias becomes ingrained in a persons mind.
These judgements will also 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, 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. 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 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"7. 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.
Elizabeth Bennet of course married Mr. Darcy. It so turned out that he was a very decent man who had been misjudged (perhaps we can now say any first judgement is a misjudgement) and misunderstood. People, in general, conceal so much from us, as we do with others. When put in such terms it seems ludicrous to surmise a person based on fleeting and superficial encounters. As rational agents in the world, to act in accordance with our nature is to think before passing judgement, to know that behind the mask is an individual much akin to ourselves who has suffered, grieved and loved.
* It must be said that the evolutionary argument has received a considerable amount of criticism among philosophers. This is because the reasoning is a ‘Just So’ case. That is, the explanation fits because we reasoned it to fit. It therefore does not necessarily mean that the reason we have a quick, discriminatory threat detection system is because of an evolutionary advantage. I think that it likely is for this reason that we do have such a system, however appealing to an evolutionary argument alone, is a display of poor argumentation.
1. 'Impressions Based on a Portrait Predict', Gunaydin, Selcuk, & Zayas, 2017.
2. 'Understanding Implicit and Explicit Attitude Change: A Systems of Reasoning Analysis', Rydell & McConnell, 2006.
3. 'The Emotional Brain', Joseph LeDoux, 1998.
4. 'From circuits to Behaviour in the Amygdala', Patricia H. Janak & Kay M. Tye, 2015.
5. 'Alexia for Braille following bilateral occipital stroke in an early blind woman', R Hamilton, J. P. Keenan, M. Catala & A. Pascual-Leone, 2000.
6. 'Sex, lies, & brain scans: How fMRI reveals what really goes on in our minds', Sahakian, B. J. & Gottwald, J, 2017.
7. 'Psychology and Religion: West and East', Carl Jung, 1958.