First Impressions - Part I: General Principles

Our first impressions of people and situations affect everything we think or do. Once we label a person, his cards, or anything else, that label affects the information we look for and the way we process it. If subsequent information agrees with that label, we tend to give it too much credibility. If that information disagrees with our label, we tend to minimize its importance or ignore it completely.

You may think you are too intelligent to think this way, but nearly everyone does it, and it creates immense problems. Since winning poker demands objectively assessing players and situations, let's look at some research about these distortions. Then, we'll discuss ways to minimize their effects on you, but use them against your opponents.

Harold Kelley, my colleague at UCLA, once demonstrated that a tiny difference in labels could affect the way people perceived and reacted to everything they saw or heard. After telling his students that they would listen to a guest lecture, he created a first impression by giving them two written introductions. The introductions were identical except for one word. They described his training, degrees, and experience, and included this sentence: "People who know him well see him as rather warm (or cold)."

Everything else was the same. The students went through an entire class, listened to the same words, heard the same voice, and saw the same body language. They had thousands of bits of identical data, but only one tiny difference – "warm" versus "cold."

Observers counted the number of times that students interacted with him. Students with the "warm" introduction interacted twice as much. They were obviously more comfortable with a "warm" person than a "cold" one, even though it was the same person.

After class, the students assessed the teacher. Students with the "warm" introduction saw him as more knowledgeable, intelligent, informal, considerate, sociable, popular, humane, and humorous. In other words, one tiny difference in the introduction made them see and react to him as if he were a very different person.

To minimize the effects of first impressions, medical students are taught to avoid making rapid diagnoses. Their teachers know that once they have diagnosed a patient, doctors will look for information that supports their diagnosis and minimize or ignore conflicting evidence. Of course, they won't do it deliberately; doctors do not want to make mistakes, but they are as vulnerable as college students (or poker players).

The law absolutely requires controlling this effect when conducting medical research. The FDA will not approve a drug that has not been very carefully tested using double blind methods. A drug and a placebo (such as a sugar pill) must be given to carefully matched samples of patients. Both the patients receiving a drug and the doctors assessing its effects must not know who has received the drug or placebo.

If the patients knew, the ones receiving the drug would probably respond more positively, even if the drug was worthless. The tendency to improve from worthless drugs is called "the placebo effect," and it is extraordinarily powerful. Placebos have "cured" everything from allergies to cancer.

The doctors assessing the drug's effects must not know who has received it or the placebo. If they knew who got the drug, they would expect to see more improvement, and they would find it. That effect has been demonstrated hundreds of times. People, even well-trained doctors, see what they expect, want, or are afraid to see.

Another study showed that psychiatrists and other mental hospital staff members flatly refused to revise their diagnoses, even when they had received unequivocally conflicting evidence. Several psychologists went to a mental hospital and complained of hearing voices, a classic symptom of schizophrenia. Even though they had no other complaints, they were diagnosed as schizophrenic. They then stopped claiming to hear voices and acted normally. The doctors and other hospital staff members stuck with their diagnoses, long after they should have recognized their mistake.

These effects of first impressions are a major obstacle to playing well. We simply can't win without accurately reading other players and their cards, and anything that distorts our readings is going to hurt our results. While playing, we get an enormous amount of information, and subsequent bits often conflict with previous ones. To win, we must continuously look for information and interpret it well to determine how people play and what cards they hold. If we ignore or misinterpret subsequent information because of our first impressions, it will cost us lots of money.

The effects of this tendency combine with one of my favorite subjects, the extremely common belief that we are more talented than we really are (see "Overestimating our Abilities," Nov. 7, 2003). Our first impressions are probably not that good, because we don't think as well as we think we do.

Giving ourselves credit for more talent than we possess is especially common when it comes to reading people; far too many people think they do it well. Every psychologist has been irritated repeatedly by people who say, "Do you think I could succeed as a poker player (or shoe salesman, bartender, or whatever) if I wasn't a good psychologist? I'm good at reading people." I have had to fight hard to keep from saying, "Oh, no you're not. You just think you are."

That same overconfidence makes many people think they read cards much better than they really do. In The Psychology of Poker (Page 43), I gave an extreme example of this overconfidence. The "Deluded Expert" has "extremely low skill, but extremely high confidence. He can't read cards for beans, but he thinks he can. He is an amazing combination of ignorance, arrogance, and obnoxiousness." You certainly have met many of them. They love to say, "I know you've got pocket aces (or whatever)," and some of their reads are hilariously wrong; they jump to conclusions without carefully and objectively analyzing the betting and the players, then insist they are right.

Overestimating our abilities is not an unusual problem. Nearly all of us do it, and it increases the distorting effects of making quick judgments about people and situations. For example, if a new player makes an apparently dumb play, we're quick to categorize him as a bad player. But if we make a crazy, out-of-line play ourselves, we may believe we did it for a good reason (we were "advertising," or "mixing up our game," or "playing the player, not the cards," or … ). We tend to stereotype or oversimplify our first impressions of others, but are much more forgiving (or defensive) about ourselves. After all, we know we aren't bad players, but want to believe that others are. In fact, all of us have underestimated opponents, and we all have paid dearly for it.

Because first impressions have such large effects, we have two critically important tasks:

1. Reduce the way first impressions distort our thinking.

2. Create false impressions for our opponents and magnify their effects.

Part II of this series will discuss ways to accomplish the first task, but it is such a natural reaction that it can't be completely accomplished. Part III will cover techniques for maximizing this distortion for our opponents. My goals are to help you to see things clearly, while confusing your opposition.

Alan often plays at royalvegaspoker.com as one of its team of experts. You can order his book, The Psychology of Poker, through Card Player.