for W3c validation
I really hate to say it, but I think they are extremely accurate. About a year ago, my dad, friend, and I were talking about how you determine who to associate with. To me, 1st impressions are a huge piece to that decision. Call it “gut” feel, but it seems to have served me pretty well so far- I have many great friends (you know who you are) who I pretty much knew would be great friends from the moment I met them. Yes, there are certainly exceptions to this general rule, but I seem to be able to pretty accurately gauge how good a friend will be based on my 1st impression. Does anyone else feel this way? If you are not a believer in 1st impressions, it would be great to hear your thoughts on the subject. Rob got me thinking about this topic with this post. BusinessPundit uses the following quote to defend the point that the opinion of a teacher by a complete stranger is about the same as that of someone who has sat through a semester long class:
In a 1993 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 64, No. 3), Ambady and a colleague videotaped 13 graduate teaching fellows as they taught their classes. She then took three random 10-second clips from each tape, combined them into one 30-second clip for each teacher and showed the silent clips to students who did not know the teachers. The student judges rated the teachers on 13 variables, such as “accepting,” “active,” “competent” and “confident.” Ambady combined these individual scores into one global rating for each teacher and then correlated that rating with the teachers’ end-of-semester evaluations from actual students.
“We were shocked at how high the correlation was,” she says. It was 0.76. In social psychology anything above 0.6 is considered very strong.
Curious to see how thin she could make her slices before affecting the student judges’ accuracy, Ambady cut the length of the silent clips to 15 seconds, and then to six. Each time, the students accurately predicted the most successful teachers.
“There was no significant difference between the results with 30-second clips and six-second clips,” Ambady says.
In a later experiment in the same study, she cut out the middleman–the global variable–and simply asked students to rate, based on thin-slice video clips, the quality and performance of the teachers. Again, the ratings correlated highly with the teachers’ end-of-semester evaluations. Ambady also replicated her results with high school teachers.
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