We look at people's physical appearance, such as eyes, hair, and height, all the time. When we meet someone we don't know, we create an idea of what that person is like in our mind. This is called a first impression.
How do we create first impressions of people? Most of the time, we see what the person looks like. For example, we may think that a person wearing glasses looks smart.
A writer, Malcolm Gladwell, wrote about how we make decisions using our first impressions. He did a survey of the leaders of big companies in the United States. He found that a lot of them were tall men--about 1.8 meters. Most men in the United States are about 1.75 meters tall. Gladwell says that we choose taller people to be our leaders without knowing it. This is because tall people feel like leaders to us. But not everyone agrees. We don't always make important decisions based on only our first impressions.
Giving people a good first impression can be important, like in a job interview. But first impressions are not always true. We often change how we feel about people when we know them better.
