People Put You in One of These Two Categories When They Meet You, Says Harvard Psychologist

Amy Cuddy, a professor at Harvard Business School, has studied how people judge each other in their first encounter for fifteen years. In research done across more than two dozen countries, she found the same clear, distinctive patterns.

michaelpuche/iStock

It’s often stressed that first impressions are important, but what are those first impressions?

Amy Cuddy, a professor at Harvard Business School, has studied how people judge each other in their first encounter for 15 years. In research done across more than two dozen countries, she found the same clear, distinctive patterns.

People ask, and answer, two questions when they first meet you, Cuddy writes in her new book “Presence”:

• Can I trust this person?
• Can I respect this person?

Psychologists refer to these attributes as “warmth” and “competence,” and they found that people have a tendency to see them as mutually exclusive, typecasting others as “lovable fools” or “competent jerks.”

“Usually we think that a person we’ve just met is either more warm than competent or more competent than warm, but not both in equal measure,” Cuddy writes. “We like our distinctions to be clear—it’s a human bias. So we classify new acquaintances into types. Tiziana Casciaro, in her research into organizations, refers to these types as lovable fools or competent jerks.”

Amy Cuddy speaks onstage during Cosmopolitan Magazine's Fun Fearless Life Conference powered by WME Live at The David Koch Theatre at Lincoln Center on November 8, 2014 in New York City. Craig Barritt/Getty Images