First Impressions

[Isaiah 2011]

I am doing a psychology experiment for science fair, and I would love to learn more about social cognition. Our project deals with predicting first impressions of participants. I have a few general questions:

1. How are first impressions formed?
2. What are stereotypes?
3. Where does social cognition take place in the brain?
4. What characteristics/ behviors of the human subjects (examples: gender, age, amount of televison watched per day, ethnicity, rural versus urban, birth order, and amount of out-of-state and international travel) relate the most to predictibility of first impressions?
5. How are stereotypes used when forming first impressions?

Any help will be very much appreciated.

[deleted-2574]

Hi Isaiah,

1. Submitting “How are first impressions formed?” to bing.com yields many sites. One of them:
http://www.enotalone.com/article/19441.html
discusses specific brain areas.

2. What are stereotypes? I’m not sure what your question is here. The dictionary meaning is:
a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.

3. Submitting “social cognition” to answers.com yields:
http://www.answers.com/topic/social-cognition
This page discusses how damage to specific brain areas affects different types of social cognition. There may be additional information under the links on this page and references, which I haven’t checked.

4. No opinion here.

5. How are stereotypes used when forming first impressions? You might see if any of the bing.com outputs answer your question.

[Isaiah 2011]

Any other comments, answers, or suggestions?

Thank you, Mr. Kellman, for your help.