Joulia Smortchkova (Oxford) First Impressions and Social Perception

When we enter a room full of people we don’t know, we immediately form quick impressions of others: someone seems attractive, someone else extroverted, yet another confident… In my talk, I will discuss the nature of first impressions. Do we really perceive complex social properties like attractiveness (extroversion, confidence, …)? And if we do, what are the consequences for our theories of mindreading and social cognition? I will offer a proposal for disentangling the properly perceptual aspect of first impressions (i.e. social perception), from their interpretative aspect, by appealing to valence perception, and explore how each aspect differently impacts our everyday social interactions.