New Insight Into How We Form Impressions of One Another

Chujun Lin hasn’t had a lot of downtime to explore New York City since she joined Columbia in July, but, fortunately, her research has taken her across the city. For a study analyzing strangers’ first impressions of each other, she went to Central Park, Washington Square Park, Times Square, and LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy airports, among other locales, collecting data. The research is part of Lin’s ongoing inquiry into how people form impressions of each other, and how those impressions inform their behavior in the real world. Columbia News spoke to Lin about what led her to that research area, and to Columbia.

What does your lab look at?

My research focuses on how people form impressions of one another in the real world. I look at the information people use when they meet for the first time, such as appearance, movement, and speech. I’m interested in the mechanism behind these impressions and their downstream consequences in areas like law, politics, and communication: What impressions are you forming of me, why are you forming those impressions, and are these impressions going to change how you treat me?

A lot of previous research has looked at our reactions to how people look in highly artificial, controlled environments—by examining how study subjects react to a photo showing different body parts, like a face, in isolation. My lab questions the validity of these paradigms, and tries to really understand all the factors that lead to us forming judgments of people in the real world. We use computational tools to help us capture complex information in the real world and model complex processes in the mind. For instance, those tools allow us to quantify the subtle differences among all possible body poses, all vocal features, and all scenes. They allow us to alter one aspect of how someone appears—like changing their clothes, actions, or voice digitally and naturally without modifying anything else about the person and scene—to isolate information that causally shapes subjects’ reactions. They also allow us to test mechanisms in the mind, such as whether the mind inevitably collapses social concepts, putting them into just a few bins, or it is capable of keeping track of complex relations between numerous social concepts.  

Another important tool my lab uses is cross-cultural design: we try to sample people from every region of the world to better understand which of our findings are universal, and which are specific to a single culture.

What’s an example of a recent finding that surprised you?

One line of recent studies showed us that people use a very different set of cues to make judgments about others in naturalistic settings than in the controlled settings that prior work focused on. 

We found that clothing was actually more influential on perceptions of attractiveness than facial features. Actions—like what the person was doing—were more important than facial structure in shaping people’s judgments of how dominant someone is; and vocal features such as changes in volume and tone made people change their impressions of the target individual more than what the person actually said. These findings suggest a general principle of how people use cues in the real world: In real-world situations where people are taking in a lot of information, they pick cues that often provide unique insights beyond other cues about a person, such as cues that people have more freedom to change. 

We also found that people use different cues for different questions. When we ask people to judge how warm a person is, they prioritize their facial expressions. When we ask them to judge their competence, they look at their actions instead. So people are actually using information quite smartly to make inferences quickly even when bombarded with a wealth of information.

Another line of research we did challenged a long-standing paradigm in our field, which has suggested that only a handful of personality traits can summarize how people judge others. Previous research has posited a “Big Five” of personality traits (Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism), or even just two dimensions, warmth and competence. We found that reality is more complex and the mind seems to be more resourceful than previously thought. Our judgments are better understood as a network of many interconnected concepts, where each concept is distinct in how it relates to others, even for semantically similar judgments such as intellect and education. These findings suggest that people do not simply mush together similar impressions into a few dimensions; instead, they maintain a nuanced, high-dimensional understanding of others that reflects the complexity of the real world. 

What led you to this research?

I have a PhD in social sciences from California Institute of Technology, which doesn’t have a psychology department. I came into the program thinking I was going to research behavioral economics, but I read a paper my first year that showed that people cast their votes based on how competent politicians look, drawing their decisions from their faces. My advisor at the time, Michael Alvarez, suggested I do a cross-cultural replication of that and connected me to Ralph Adolphs, who later became my PhD advisor, and one of the most influential figures in my academic career. That very first project of mine was inspired by noticing the limitations of existing cross-cultural studies on the topic, and I wanted to improve their design. Since then, a lot of my research sort of evolved from that—recognizing the gap between prior work and reality and figuring out how to bridge that gap. When I was a postdoc at Dartmouth College working with Mark Thornton, I developed computational tools that have become central to my lab’s ongoing pursuit of a more comprehensive understanding of how people perceive others in reality. 

How do you like New York City?

I’m from a big city originally: Guangzhou, in China. I like New York. It’s an energizing, bustling city and it reminds me of home. California and New Hampshire were starting to feel a little too relaxed for me.

Do you have any favorite activities in New York yet?

I’ve been traveling around the city for a new study where we’re studying people in public spaces. We invite strangers to chat, and we measure everything about their appearance, behavior, physiological signals, and the interaction. We’re really trying to get out of the lab, and to see how people form snap judgments and how the judgments change their behavior in real life. 

It’s been a great way to explore the city, but I still haven’t gotten many chances to eat out or go to shows!