April 11, 2012 • 31 mins
It's no secret that first impressions count for a lot, but how does the science of first impressions actually work? Listen in to learn more about how people judge first impressions -- and whether these judgments are accurate.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff Mom Never Told You from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline. And since we're talking about first
impressions today, I figured we could get things kicked off
with Facebook because Facebook is now the ultimate tool that
(00:27):
we have to mold our first impression of ourselves to
the public. Right, this is your chance to pick to
steal an ad from some magazine and scan it in
and have it be your profile picture the way that
the world sees you. You can go in, you can
photo shop away any any blemish that you don't like,
(00:48):
use your best angle, your best outfit, maybe do a
hip stomatic wash. Steal Mark Twain quotes as your status is,
and not tell anyone, because assuming your friends haven't read
any Mark Twain, you can be the perfect person or
the perfect person in your mind. I mean, obviously, first
impressions are entirely subjective, but I do think it's uh,
(01:11):
it's we live in an interesting time where Facebook allows
us to mold that public persona. So why don't we
personalize things a little bit, Caroline and talk about our
stuff mom Never told You Facebook page? Because we recently
had to update our format to the Facebook timelines. So
we had to pick the large image that goes behind
(01:35):
our normal profile picture. Right, So Kristen and I went
out to the beach and had the photographer take pictures
of us dancing in the waves. Yes, although there are
like six of us somehow, Yeah, we know magic magic
one of our brilliant camera wizards. That's a real staff
position here and all stuff works. One of our camera
(01:56):
wizards created, um, a number of images for us to
choose from, something to capture the essence of stuff. Mom
never told you to create that great first impression of
who we are, and it was very hard to choose
from she She made all these awesome images, and um,
it was tough to choose, and we decided to go
with the neurotic swimmers dancing in the surf in old
(02:21):
timey bathing suits. We want, we wanted to give you
the listener the right first impression of us, which is
that we are ridiculous. We are footloose, we are fancy free,
frequently dancing in water, modest in our swimwear, but with
good hairstyles the whole way through. Yeah, I gotta say, though, Um,
I wonder, I wonder what are the first impression of
(02:43):
the actual picture of you and me offers? Because we
are sitting back to back in a very very olden
mills girl kind of My roommate told me that it
gives off the worst first impression and then it is
not the best picture of me, and that we need
to get into the student you pronto to get more
pictures taken. You know, I was told that as well.
But I do have to admit that when I first
(03:06):
saw that that back to back sort of cheesy, cheesy.
It's not sort of it's cheesy, we can be honest,
that cheesy photograph, there was something about it that I liked.
But I agree that perhaps it does not does not
give the best first impression, which is why I'm glad
that it's now nestled into a much larger background of
(03:27):
dancing bathing ladies. Well, but so is Facebook a tool
to portray your real self then or a better self? Well,
here's the thing for everyone out there who and I'm
guilty of this as well, who has intentionally crafted profile
pictures and profile information to create, you know, sort of
(03:50):
an idealized self. You're failing, really? Yeah? Um, The thing is,
according to a two thousand nine study by Sam Gosling
at the University of Texas at Austin, the impressions that
people make based on your Facebook profiles are actually closer
(04:10):
to the reality of who you are than that idealized
stelf that you might want to project. Yes, so people
were able to pick up on the actual aspects of
your personality, like if you're one of those people, sorry
no offense, but if you're one of those people who
post sad status updates all the time, like it's what
(04:30):
I am, I have no one to talk to. It's like,
now I'm gonna hide, you hide, hide. I don't want
to read that. And so I think those statuses are
an accurate reflection of some of those people because thepeaking personally,
because they're obviously not trying to gussie up their their
image at all. It sounds like what Gosling did was
(04:52):
he found I think it was two hundred and thirty
six people on Facebook UM and he had them fill
out personality trait questionnaires to get a sense of who
they actually were and UM, and then he had strangers
come in and look at the profiles and give their
impression of these UM strangers based on their profiles and
(05:15):
come to find out, the impressions that the strangers had
were fairly accurate compared to the actual personality traits, and
especially for traits like extra version, it easily comes across
through Facebook. The one trait, however, that was the hardest
to detect based on Facebook profiles is neuroticism. So on mine,
(05:38):
not on mine, But perhaps that's because you know you well,
I don't know. I'm not going to make any value
judgments on your perceived neuroticism. Well, one of my most
recent status updates was about how I was on my
way to urgent care because I got bitten by a spider.
So that just sounds like you're living on the edge.
Living on the sounds like your adventurous well, or I
(06:01):
got bit while I was sleeping, so whatever. So moving
on from Facebook to the real world where spiders bike, Caroline, Um,
let's talk about how first impressions, when you first see someone,
when you first make that handshake, what happens in our brains, Like,
how do we process it? How long does it take
for our brains to take that snapshot and decide whether
(06:24):
or not we like or don't like what we see.
It's immediate. You have milliseconds to decide um what you
think about someone, and you have middle seconds to give
a very good impression. And especially if you were shaking
someone's hand, that also comes into play, and we'll talk
about that later. But a two thousand six study by
Princeton psychologist Janine Willis and Alexander Todorev found that it
(06:47):
took only a tenth of a second to form an
impression of a stranger from his or her face, and
the longer you were exposed to that person did not
change the impression that you had of them. What it
did was just real force the impression you already had.
So once you meet someone and you think this person
is great and they're nice and they're outgoing, you're no
(07:08):
longer seeking information to disprove that. You're seeking backup information
to fall in line with the impression that you've developed.
And unfortunately, the same thing goes for a negative impression.
You don't seek out. Well, a lot of times some
you know, probably the better people among us, might seek
out those positive attributes, but a lot of times if
you get a you know, offer a first um impression
(07:29):
that's negative that is imprinted on the other person's brain
in that tenth of a second, and those same prison
psychologists suspect that it might take an even shorter amount
of time because a tenth of a second was simply
like the shortest time frame that they've tested, Right, Well,
so what is actually going on in the brain when
(07:51):
a first impression is happening? Like, what what's part of
the process of deciding about what you think about a person?
And this is coming from Dr Rick now Art for
psych Central. He broke down a two thousand nine study
from the journal Nature Neuroscience that explored the formation of
a first impression and subjects were given profiles of fictional
(08:12):
people that included both a photo and a list of
the person's positive and negative traits, and they use neuroimaging
to find out what was happening in the brain as
the person processed the photo, what the person looked like,
and their traits. They found activity in two regions of
the brain during this encoding process, the process of taking
(08:33):
in impression relevant info, things that confirmed what they already thought.
And they found that things were just lighten up in
the amygdala and the posterior singulate cortex. And when we
talk about the what these structures are responsible for the
kind of emotional links that they have. It makes a
lot of sense that these two areas lit up because
the amygdala is related a lot to our emotional learning
(08:57):
about inanimate objects. Um. It's also what lights up and
um with large emotional responses. For instance, if we get
angry at something, the amygdala will go off, and then
the posterior singulate cortex is linked to economic decision making
an assigning subjective value to rewards. So this is weighing
the pros and the cons of Hey, I don't know,
I don't know if I like how you look, I
(09:18):
don't know if you're trustworthy. Um, is this going to
be a beneficial acquaintance for me to forge? And all
of this is happening so quickly in those meloseconds. And
speaking of the amygdala, there was another piece of research
that I found on the gender differences between first impressions
and how our brains formed them and men. Just on
(09:40):
a side note, men tend to show greater amygdala activation
in response to women's faces, so they might you know,
we talk a lot about how men tend to be
more visually stimulated, and that might be one one piece
of evidence to that. Okay, so your brain is processing
all of this so quickly. There's all this stuff going
(10:00):
on your in your brain weighing the pros and cons
of this person you've just encountered. But how accurate is it?
And there was a two thousand nine study by psychologist
Laura Norman and Sam Gosling, who you mentioned earlier from
UT Austin, and they gave pictures of a hundred and
twenty three people, two observers, and the people in the
pictures were either neutral, like you know, just standing their
(10:21):
stone faced, or they were just naturally posed however they
would naturally stand. And so they compared the observer's judgments
with the targets self descriptions to sort of get try
to get an accurate picture of who these people were
and how accurate the observers were. And they said that
the observers were accurately able to judge a lot of
(10:42):
personality traits. Yeah, they analyzed ten different traits. They wanted
to see whether or not the study participants could pick
up on traits including extra version, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, loneliness, religiosity,
and political orientation. And get this observers were accurate for
(11:03):
nine out of the ten traits. When viewing the target
in a naturally expressive pose, if you're just standing there,
stock still, with a neutral expression on your face, it
can be harder to say. You know, if you're just
staring blankly at me, I can't be like Caroline. You
must be lonely catholic who displays tense of neuroticism. Now
(11:23):
you can't just you know that that's harder to pick
up on. But if you are in some sort of
expressive pose, we tend to form those The amygdala and
the posterior singulate cortex kick into gear and start making
those subjective value judgments. Um, and things like extra version.
We've mentioned this before. Extra Version is easy for us
to pick up on because people smile more, You stand
(11:45):
in more energetic and less tense ways. You look healthier,
neater ic, and stylish. Yeah yeah, but um. People who
were judged to be more open to experience were less
likely to have that healthy knee appearance, but more likely
to have a distinctive style of dress. I don't know
if this means that they're like on the cutting edge
(12:05):
of fashion or if they showed up in a clown suit. Well,
it sounds to me like there might be zanier zany
sword that comes to mind. You're open to experience. You know,
you're you're you don't have to stay within the mold, right,
And talking about gender divisions, as far as appearance goes,
males with a neat and healthy appearance were judged to
be more conscientious. But according to this study, we women
(12:27):
are a little harder to crack. Apparently defining personality and
women was more difficult because we are apparently more strongly
influenced by cultural demands to look presentable. In other words,
we are so lovely it is hard to detect the
negativity among us, and those detection skills likely go back
a long long time. It's not that we are just
(12:49):
horrible judgmental people. Um, this is actually a useful trait
that we evolved so that we could quickly says whether
or not someone was a threat to us. Yeah, and
it does depend what we're judging. Um. This is Paul Eckman,
a psych professor at you See Medical School in San Francisco.
(13:10):
He said, you know, and this is kind of a
common sense. I think it's it's easier for us to
pick up on emotion than it is to tell right
away if someone's really smart, like you said, you know,
judging from those those neutral poses, you know, you can't
tell what someone's religion is just by looking at them. Um.
But there are a lot of things that can alter
our perception of people. If we are angry, So like,
(13:33):
we have this lens that we see the world through,
and if we're angry, it actually incites prejudiced responses toward outsiders.
So that could be dangerous. If you go out of
your house in a really bad mood and someone maybe
cuts you off in traffic, you're just gonna assume this
person is terrible. Um. But there's there's also people on
the flip side with baby faces. Uh, those people with
(13:56):
a round face, big eyes, and a small nose. They
tend to give the impression of trustworthiness and naivete. And
they cited the example of UM actors like Leonardo DiCaprio
who end up trying to take like tougher roles and
grow goateees to make themselves look tough and combat this perception.
But another thing that colors our perception is beauty. And
(14:18):
this should come as no surprise. We tend to think
that a person who is beautiful is healthier and just
plain better than maybe we are, or than the general population. Yeah,
especially if we perceive them to be more attractive than
we are, then we immediately elevate them to be just
fantastic people, leaps and bounds beyond where we are. Yeah.
(14:41):
And something else that colors that this is Leslie zebra
Witz from Brandis University, and she said that the people
who have the best judgments about strangers, make you know
when they have a first impression of someone, are people
who actually get out among people and develop relationships. They
make more accurate snap judgments. So those are probably though,
the extroverts that we're talking about, extroverts. You are really
(15:05):
looking good in this podcast and extroversion introversion. Notwithstanding, Randy
Colvin at Northeastern University, who is the psychology professor there,
points out that I thought this was great. Mentally, healthy
individuals are the easiest to judge, so it's hard to
spot crazy. This is what I'm learning from this podcast. Yeah,
(15:28):
it's it is hard to make that judgment, I guess,
But I mean, how do you know if someone's faking?
But anyway, well, Colvin said that healthy individuals exterior behavior
mimics their internal views of themselves, and so what you
see is what you get. But going back to Paul Ekman,
he said that we have a really hard time picking
up on fake emotion right off the bat. And I mean, obviously,
(15:48):
if you spend any degree of time with someone, you
can probably tell they're full of it, you know, But
it's that initial snap judgment where you're if you're all
smiley and bubbly, you think, oh my gosh, that person
is so happy. Are not going And we have to
remember too, when we're talking about first impressions, we're talking
about a window of seconds, if not millisecond um. And
then there's also the issue of how much alike we
(16:10):
perceive someone to be. If we feel some kind of
immediate kinship or affiliation with a person, of course that's
going to make them look even better in our eyes
because we are making those those economic reward value judgments.
And this corresponds to a n study and social cognition
were subjects were asked to form impressions of a target
(16:32):
person who was similar or dissimilar to them in terms
of attitudes and activity preferences. And it turns out that
if someone has activity interests in common with you, that
affects your liking judgments and your influences your inferences of
socially desirable traits. So you want to hang out with
somebody who has similar activity interests if their attitude is similar,
(16:54):
that affects your respect judgments and influences your inferences of
intellectually desirable traits. So if someone shares your attitude about
politics or hot dogs or whatever, you're gonna think they're
pretty smart cookie. If they like to do the same
things that you do, you're gonna want to hang out
with them, which makes sense, Like talking about my interests
are talking politics while eating hot dogs? Yeah, and if
(17:17):
if I pick up on that right away, I'm gonna
want to get to know you better. Yeah, let's eat
hot dogs together and talk about the presidential rave. But
if you are concerned at all about how accurate your
first impressions are, then there is a way that you
can't improve upon them. And this is all very much
common sense to me. This is based on a two
(17:39):
thousand nine study also published in the Journal of Psychological Science,
and essentially the researchers found that if you go out
of your way to make a more accurate first impression
to judge people more accurately. You're gonna do that. The
only downside of that is it might not mean that
(18:00):
you will like what you find. You are less likely
to come out with a positive um first impression then
you would otherwise be. Yeah, if your radar is up,
you're trying to pick up on everything. Whereas if you're
just bumping into someone in line at the grocery store,
you might think, Oh, that person the jerk, or oh,
this person seems really friendly, Whereas if you've been told like, okay,
(18:21):
you have to pick up on you know, everything about
this person as soon as you meet them, you're probably
going to be more attuned to the intricacies of their personality.
And those are the kind of situations that would probably
come up in something like a job interview or if
you you know, if you're going to an event of
some sort where you need to make a first impression
or you need to have your you know, first impression, uh,
(18:45):
gauges on more accurately than just walking down the street. Yeah,
And something else that happens in a job interview sege
is handshaking and a two thousand University of Alabama study
that a firm handshake was related positive heavily to extra
version and emotional expressiveness, but negatively to shyness and neuroticism.
There's that thing again. Um. It was also positively related
(19:09):
to openness to experience, but only for women. Yeah. The
researchers suggest that since we expect for men to have
a firmed handshake, and because handshaking going back into history
has existed as this form of agreement and camaraderie, specifically
between men, I will not kill you, right, the war
(19:31):
is over handshake? Um, then for women, now we a
firm handshake from us will sort of open open us
up in men's eyes. Right. And the researchers in the
study found that, you know, so openness to experience firm
handshake women well, more open women are perceived more favorably
(19:53):
by the the the handshake researchers in the study the
judges of handshakes. But men with a less firm handshake
we're seen as more open, and we're judged less favorably.
So men with soft handshakes seem more let's just say it,
they seem more feminine. That could be thereby our judge
(20:16):
less favorably I'm just gonna say, on a side note,
I pay attention to my handshake. I think I got
a pretty good handshake. I think I have a good
one too, just because I was also raised by a
woman who was like, oh, that man just gave me
a limp handshake, so let's let's shake hands right now.
It's pretty good. Thanks, you could tighten your grip. Wait,
you know what, I was trying to reach out a
microphone also, I, um, well, I did use my I'm
(20:39):
left handed, but I immediately reached out my right hand.
That's right, yeah, moving in a right handed world. Um,
current events side note when I mean it wasn't at
the time, but it is pertinent now. My mother was
one of our chaperones on my eighth grade Washington, d C.
Trip and Newt Gingrich met my entire class and was
shaking everybody, everybody's hands and she, my mother leans down
(20:59):
to me this like he has a lamp handshake. She
didn't like him. After that, She's like lost my vote. Yeah,
if she voted, I don't know. So something as innocuous
as a politician giving a quick handshake to your mother
could have the ramification of her, you know, creating all
of these value judgments around how he would effectively or
(21:23):
ineffectively governed. All right, you could say that that could
be an example of a horns effect of a first
impression exactly. Yeah, there's this halo effect versus horns effect
thing that comes up in the book First Impressions, What
you don't know about how others see you by and
Demo Ray and Valerie White and this is coming Good
(21:45):
Morning America ran an excerpt of this book on their website.
And apparently, when you meet someone and you get a
good first impression right off the bat, they give you
a good handshake, or they're open or extroverted, it has
a ripple effect and you make immediate judgment about how
they are in other areas. So if they are if
you judge them to be awesome right off the bat,
(22:06):
then you also probably are assuming that they're nice, you know, generous, kind, extroverted.
If you get a bad impression, like my mother did
of New Gingrich back in um, she all of a
sudden had this horrible opinion of him that he must
be weak and you know, kind of just she thought
he was icky, is what she said. Yeah, laziness is
(22:28):
a trait that comes up a lot and evaluating first
impressions positive and negative traits. Yeah, and like we talked
about earlier, it tends to color how you see that
person from then on out. And it takes a long
time to overcome a bad first impression. Whereas people forgive
you easily if if you've made a good first impression
and then the next day you're kind of cold and
(22:49):
self absorbed and kind of a jerk, people forgive you
because they think, well, this isn't in line with their characteristics.
You know, they're they're probably a good person having a
bad day. This reminds me of a it a mistake
that I made my first year of high school. See,
I was homeschooled in middle school. So the first day
of high school was a really big idea, A really
(23:10):
a really big deal, I should say to me, still
working things out in my head about it, and it
was such a big deal. And of course I bought,
you know, a new outfit for my first day of school,
but I decided that I should save this killer outfit
not for the first day, but for the second day
of school. You know, I could just like blend in
like the first day, because everybody's gonna be I really
(23:32):
thought this through because I was like, you know, there's
gonna be so much going on, why not save the
killer outfit for the second day of school when everybody
else is slacked off. Yeah, it was. It totally backfire.
I were just an unfortunate combination of clothing on the
first day of school, and by the second day I
could tell that all the popular girls had already judged
(23:54):
me as this bad dresser with a bowl cut. The
bowl cut I couldn't change. Look god it. But yeah,
and I don't think that. I don't think I recovered.
But that's that's another podcast. Well you are You know
you mentioned the popular girls making a decision about you,
and people do evaluate how you make them feel. So
maybe by dressing weird and having a bowl cut, you
(24:16):
made them feel uncomfortable and therefore did not want to
hang out with you after that because they were like,
that girl makes me feel weird. I'm glad no one
told me that when I was fifteen. Caravine, I know,
I'm just crushing crushing your self esteem. It's okay in retrospect.
It is rebounded since. But this is from that First
(24:36):
Impressions book, and people tend to seek out others who
provide them with the feelings and benefits that they desire.
So if you are open and make someone feel warm
and welcome, then they're gonna want to hang out with you.
I thought I was being friendly. Well, they're their first
impression obviously was not warm and welcoming to you, right, Um,
(24:59):
who need them anyway? Exactly? Friends? But uh yeah. So
the more you the more you listen and connect with
someone that you've just met, the more likely it is
that other people will return that same attention. And one
one big question that we haven't really addressed about first
impressions is whether or not women or men are more
(25:23):
accurate with those initial judgments. I think there is a
stereotype that women are judge e er if you will,
to use the phrase that some people hate. Uh, there's
that stereotype and also the idea that because women tend
to have higher interpersonal sensitivity, that we must form more
accurate first impressions. Um. But, according to a two thousand
(25:47):
study from the University of British Columbia published in the
journal Research in Personality, while our general first impression evaluations
tend to be more accurate, we can pick out those
large personnel the traits a little bit better than men
might be able to. But when it comes to more
specifics about who people are, really no gender difference. So
(26:09):
I think it goes back to the motivation of do
we want to form an accurate judgment of someone? What
are we looking for? Are we just judging someone solely
based on whether or not they do have a bowl
cut or whether or not that person with a bowl
cut is a nice girl. I'm sure she is still
(26:32):
still uh so I think that I think that about
covers it. Yeah, I I you know you you have
a very small window in which to make everyone like you,
which is why we need to change our Facebook profile
picture pronto. People might think we're ridiculous. If anyone, if
anyone has suggestions for I don't know, some kind of
(26:53):
really cool pose that we could do, Yeah, that could
just skyrocket us. Just as warning, I have very poor balance,
so it can't be anything that involves like standing on
one leg or so I can't like boost you onto
my shoulders would immediately I would immediately fall over. Okay,
all right, well back to the drawing boards. Then, well,
(27:13):
we have given you so much information about first impressions,
a lot of which I feel like is sort of
common sense. But I think it's comforting to know that
our first impressions do steer us, at least in the
right direction, unless it's a crazy person or someone who's neurotic,
in which case you never can tell, you know, unless
they're carrying around a lot of cats. So that's all
(27:35):
we have for you today, mom. Stuff at Discovery dot
com is where you can send your thoughts and feelings
about first impressions, and we have a couple of emails here,
the first of which is in response to a listener
email from UH from a couple of episodes ago. Okay,
(27:56):
this is from Jessica. She has some advice. She says,
I'm a thirty four years old and I'm actively engaged
in muy tai, which is tai kickboxing. At first, new
guys are generally unwilling to get into the ring with me,
but after a few times they get totally used to
it and are absolutely willing to become more regular sparring partners.
You can't forget that in a big way. They are
breaking very ingrained taboos to never hit girls. It's hard
(28:18):
for them and they don't want to feel like jerks
for now. I know it's frustrating, and I agree with
the advice to talk to your instructor about it. Sometimes
working with someone at a much lower level than you
gets annoying because you don't feel like you're getting a
workout or progressing. So ask to work with someone of
a much higher level than you from time to time,
even if they're much bigger. It's great for them to
work on their technique. And think about that when you're
(28:39):
working with people at a lower level, and you'll feel
yourself progressing too and won't get discouraged again. Just keep
it up and wait it out. Remember you're not going
to win any fight by giving up, So this is
just more place to put that into practice. Well, I
have an email here from Carrie in and this is
in response to our episode on whether or not gay
house olds are more egalitarian when it comes to things
(29:03):
like splitting up chores and all that business. And she writes,
because I'm a proudly bisexual woman who is currently in
a long term relationship with a man and points out that, uh,
none of the studies that we referenced took into account
bisexual couples. And she writes, my experience with my current
partner maybe interesting to some of your listeners. We've been
(29:24):
together for eight years and began living together after only
one year. He is the love of my life and
soul mate, but that does not change my sexuality. I
think my partner found it difficult to work out what
our roles were when we moved in together because, and
we have discussed this openly and intelligently, he admits he
thought that we would just fall into stereotypical operating norms
in terms of household chores and cleaning. At the time,
(29:47):
he worked more hours than I did, but I earned more,
so money or time wasn't always a situation, as the
one study you discussed positive. I am happy to take
responsibility for outside manly chores like mo and gardening, but
do not enjoy them, so I hire a handyman to
take care of it. My partner is a great cook
and enjoys creating new dishes and trying new recipes, so
(30:07):
he is the kitchen god. I am very grateful, but
to help us both enjoy the kitchen where we installed
a dishwasher. Oh man, that does make a big difference.
We have discussed having children and I've already decided that
as I get huge job satisfaction and he not so much,
that he would stay home with a baby and I
would go to work as soon as I was physically
able after the birth. Our misconceptions about the style of
(30:29):
our relationship was a hurdle at first, but made us
very good communicators and our relationship is so strong now
because of it. UM and she and talking about those studies,
I did find one study regarding UM gender roles and
the UM whether or not they were more egalitarian with
UM transgender couples, but bisexual couples I didn't find anything.
(30:52):
And again this is something that comes up a lot
in the podcast that there is still UM a lot
of their there there are a number of holes in
sexuality research that are starting to be filled more to
take into account more than just heater sexual homosexual couples UM.
So thanks to Carry from Australia for sending in that insight,
(31:13):
and of course if you have anything to send our way,
you can email us at Mom's Stuff at Discovery dot com.
You can find us on Facebook and look at our
lackluster profile picture, and you can also follow us on
Twitter at mom Stuff podcast and Of course, you can
read what we're up to during the week at our homesite,
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
(31:39):
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
Stuppork staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
possibilities of tomorrow. The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived.
Download it today on iTunes.
Welcome to stuff Mom Never Told You from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline. And since we're talking about first
impressions today, I figured we could get things kicked off
with Facebook because Facebook is now the ultimate tool that
(00:27):
we have to mold our first impression of ourselves to
the public. Right, this is your chance to pick to
steal an ad from some magazine and scan it in
and have it be your profile picture the way that
the world sees you. You can go in, you can
photo shop away any any blemish that you don't like,
(00:48):
use your best angle, your best outfit, maybe do a
hip stomatic wash. Steal Mark Twain quotes as your status is,
and not tell anyone, because assuming your friends haven't read
any Mark Twain, you can be the perfect person or
the perfect person in your mind. I mean, obviously, first
impressions are entirely subjective, but I do think it's uh,
(01:11):
it's we live in an interesting time where Facebook allows
us to mold that public persona. So why don't we
personalize things a little bit, Caroline and talk about our
stuff mom Never told You Facebook page? Because we recently
had to update our format to the Facebook timelines. So
we had to pick the large image that goes behind
(01:35):
our normal profile picture. Right, So Kristen and I went
out to the beach and had the photographer take pictures
of us dancing in the waves. Yes, although there are
like six of us somehow, Yeah, we know magic magic
one of our brilliant camera wizards. That's a real staff
position here and all stuff works. One of our camera
(01:56):
wizards created, um, a number of images for us to
choose from, something to capture the essence of stuff. Mom
never told you to create that great first impression of
who we are, and it was very hard to choose
from she She made all these awesome images, and um,
it was tough to choose, and we decided to go
with the neurotic swimmers dancing in the surf in old
(02:21):
timey bathing suits. We want, we wanted to give you
the listener the right first impression of us, which is
that we are ridiculous. We are footloose, we are fancy free,
frequently dancing in water, modest in our swimwear, but with
good hairstyles the whole way through. Yeah, I gotta say, though, Um,
I wonder, I wonder what are the first impression of
(02:43):
the actual picture of you and me offers? Because we
are sitting back to back in a very very olden
mills girl kind of My roommate told me that it
gives off the worst first impression and then it is
not the best picture of me, and that we need
to get into the student you pronto to get more
pictures taken. You know, I was told that as well.
But I do have to admit that when I first
(03:06):
saw that that back to back sort of cheesy, cheesy.
It's not sort of it's cheesy, we can be honest,
that cheesy photograph, there was something about it that I liked.
But I agree that perhaps it does not does not
give the best first impression, which is why I'm glad
that it's now nestled into a much larger background of
(03:27):
dancing bathing ladies. Well, but so is Facebook a tool
to portray your real self then or a better self? Well,
here's the thing for everyone out there who and I'm
guilty of this as well, who has intentionally crafted profile
pictures and profile information to create, you know, sort of
(03:50):
an idealized self. You're failing, really? Yeah? Um, The thing is,
according to a two thousand nine study by Sam Gosling
at the University of Texas at Austin, the impressions that
people make based on your Facebook profiles are actually closer
(04:10):
to the reality of who you are than that idealized
stelf that you might want to project. Yes, so people
were able to pick up on the actual aspects of
your personality, like if you're one of those people, sorry
no offense, but if you're one of those people who
post sad status updates all the time, like it's what
(04:30):
I am, I have no one to talk to. It's like,
now I'm gonna hide, you hide, hide. I don't want
to read that. And so I think those statuses are
an accurate reflection of some of those people because thepeaking personally,
because they're obviously not trying to gussie up their their
image at all. It sounds like what Gosling did was
(04:52):
he found I think it was two hundred and thirty
six people on Facebook UM and he had them fill
out personality trait questionnaires to get a sense of who
they actually were and UM, and then he had strangers
come in and look at the profiles and give their
impression of these UM strangers based on their profiles and
(05:15):
come to find out, the impressions that the strangers had
were fairly accurate compared to the actual personality traits, and
especially for traits like extra version, it easily comes across
through Facebook. The one trait, however, that was the hardest
to detect based on Facebook profiles is neuroticism. So on mine,
(05:38):
not on mine, But perhaps that's because you know you well,
I don't know. I'm not going to make any value
judgments on your perceived neuroticism. Well, one of my most
recent status updates was about how I was on my
way to urgent care because I got bitten by a spider.
So that just sounds like you're living on the edge.
Living on the sounds like your adventurous well, or I
(06:01):
got bit while I was sleeping, so whatever. So moving
on from Facebook to the real world where spiders bike, Caroline, Um,
let's talk about how first impressions, when you first see someone,
when you first make that handshake, what happens in our brains, Like,
how do we process it? How long does it take
for our brains to take that snapshot and decide whether
(06:24):
or not we like or don't like what we see.
It's immediate. You have milliseconds to decide um what you
think about someone, and you have middle seconds to give
a very good impression. And especially if you were shaking
someone's hand, that also comes into play, and we'll talk
about that later. But a two thousand six study by
Princeton psychologist Janine Willis and Alexander Todorev found that it
(06:47):
took only a tenth of a second to form an
impression of a stranger from his or her face, and
the longer you were exposed to that person did not
change the impression that you had of them. What it
did was just real force the impression you already had.
So once you meet someone and you think this person
is great and they're nice and they're outgoing, you're no
(07:08):
longer seeking information to disprove that. You're seeking backup information
to fall in line with the impression that you've developed.
And unfortunately, the same thing goes for a negative impression.
You don't seek out. Well, a lot of times some
you know, probably the better people among us, might seek
out those positive attributes, but a lot of times if
you get a you know, offer a first um impression
(07:29):
that's negative that is imprinted on the other person's brain
in that tenth of a second, and those same prison
psychologists suspect that it might take an even shorter amount
of time because a tenth of a second was simply
like the shortest time frame that they've tested, Right, Well,
so what is actually going on in the brain when
(07:51):
a first impression is happening? Like, what what's part of
the process of deciding about what you think about a person?
And this is coming from Dr Rick now Art for
psych Central. He broke down a two thousand nine study
from the journal Nature Neuroscience that explored the formation of
a first impression and subjects were given profiles of fictional
(08:12):
people that included both a photo and a list of
the person's positive and negative traits, and they use neuroimaging
to find out what was happening in the brain as
the person processed the photo, what the person looked like,
and their traits. They found activity in two regions of
the brain during this encoding process, the process of taking
(08:33):
in impression relevant info, things that confirmed what they already thought.
And they found that things were just lighten up in
the amygdala and the posterior singulate cortex. And when we
talk about the what these structures are responsible for the
kind of emotional links that they have. It makes a
lot of sense that these two areas lit up because
the amygdala is related a lot to our emotional learning
(08:57):
about inanimate objects. Um. It's also what lights up and
um with large emotional responses. For instance, if we get
angry at something, the amygdala will go off, and then
the posterior singulate cortex is linked to economic decision making
an assigning subjective value to rewards. So this is weighing
the pros and the cons of Hey, I don't know,
I don't know if I like how you look, I
(09:18):
don't know if you're trustworthy. Um, is this going to
be a beneficial acquaintance for me to forge? And all
of this is happening so quickly in those meloseconds. And
speaking of the amygdala, there was another piece of research
that I found on the gender differences between first impressions
and how our brains formed them and men. Just on
(09:40):
a side note, men tend to show greater amygdala activation
in response to women's faces, so they might you know,
we talk a lot about how men tend to be
more visually stimulated, and that might be one one piece
of evidence to that. Okay, so your brain is processing
all of this so quickly. There's all this stuff going
(10:00):
on your in your brain weighing the pros and cons
of this person you've just encountered. But how accurate is it?
And there was a two thousand nine study by psychologist
Laura Norman and Sam Gosling, who you mentioned earlier from
UT Austin, and they gave pictures of a hundred and
twenty three people, two observers, and the people in the
pictures were either neutral, like you know, just standing their
(10:21):
stone faced, or they were just naturally posed however they
would naturally stand. And so they compared the observer's judgments
with the targets self descriptions to sort of get try
to get an accurate picture of who these people were
and how accurate the observers were. And they said that
the observers were accurately able to judge a lot of
(10:42):
personality traits. Yeah, they analyzed ten different traits. They wanted
to see whether or not the study participants could pick
up on traits including extra version, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, loneliness, religiosity,
and political orientation. And get this observers were accurate for
(11:03):
nine out of the ten traits. When viewing the target
in a naturally expressive pose, if you're just standing there,
stock still, with a neutral expression on your face, it
can be harder to say. You know, if you're just
staring blankly at me, I can't be like Caroline. You
must be lonely catholic who displays tense of neuroticism. Now
(11:23):
you can't just you know that that's harder to pick
up on. But if you are in some sort of
expressive pose, we tend to form those The amygdala and
the posterior singulate cortex kick into gear and start making
those subjective value judgments. Um, and things like extra version.
We've mentioned this before. Extra Version is easy for us
to pick up on because people smile more, You stand
(11:45):
in more energetic and less tense ways. You look healthier,
neater ic, and stylish. Yeah yeah, but um. People who
were judged to be more open to experience were less
likely to have that healthy knee appearance, but more likely
to have a distinctive style of dress. I don't know
if this means that they're like on the cutting edge
(12:05):
of fashion or if they showed up in a clown suit. Well,
it sounds to me like there might be zanier zany
sword that comes to mind. You're open to experience. You know,
you're you're you don't have to stay within the mold, right,
And talking about gender divisions, as far as appearance goes,
males with a neat and healthy appearance were judged to
be more conscientious. But according to this study, we women
(12:27):
are a little harder to crack. Apparently defining personality and
women was more difficult because we are apparently more strongly
influenced by cultural demands to look presentable. In other words,
we are so lovely it is hard to detect the
negativity among us, and those detection skills likely go back
a long long time. It's not that we are just
(12:49):
horrible judgmental people. Um, this is actually a useful trait
that we evolved so that we could quickly says whether
or not someone was a threat to us. Yeah, and
it does depend what we're judging. Um. This is Paul Eckman,
a psych professor at you See Medical School in San Francisco.
(13:10):
He said, you know, and this is kind of a
common sense. I think it's it's easier for us to
pick up on emotion than it is to tell right
away if someone's really smart, like you said, you know,
judging from those those neutral poses, you know, you can't
tell what someone's religion is just by looking at them. Um.
But there are a lot of things that can alter
our perception of people. If we are angry, So like,
(13:33):
we have this lens that we see the world through,
and if we're angry, it actually incites prejudiced responses toward outsiders.
So that could be dangerous. If you go out of
your house in a really bad mood and someone maybe
cuts you off in traffic, you're just gonna assume this
person is terrible. Um. But there's there's also people on
the flip side with baby faces. Uh, those people with
(13:56):
a round face, big eyes, and a small nose. They
tend to give the impression of trustworthiness and naivete. And
they cited the example of UM actors like Leonardo DiCaprio
who end up trying to take like tougher roles and
grow goateees to make themselves look tough and combat this perception.
But another thing that colors our perception is beauty. And
(14:18):
this should come as no surprise. We tend to think
that a person who is beautiful is healthier and just
plain better than maybe we are, or than the general population. Yeah,
especially if we perceive them to be more attractive than
we are, then we immediately elevate them to be just
fantastic people, leaps and bounds beyond where we are. Yeah.
(14:41):
And something else that colors that this is Leslie zebra
Witz from Brandis University, and she said that the people
who have the best judgments about strangers, make you know
when they have a first impression of someone, are people
who actually get out among people and develop relationships. They
make more accurate snap judgments. So those are probably though,
the extroverts that we're talking about, extroverts. You are really
(15:05):
looking good in this podcast and extroversion introversion. Notwithstanding, Randy
Colvin at Northeastern University, who is the psychology professor there,
points out that I thought this was great. Mentally, healthy
individuals are the easiest to judge, so it's hard to
spot crazy. This is what I'm learning from this podcast. Yeah,
(15:28):
it's it is hard to make that judgment, I guess,
But I mean, how do you know if someone's faking?
But anyway, well, Colvin said that healthy individuals exterior behavior
mimics their internal views of themselves, and so what you
see is what you get. But going back to Paul Ekman,
he said that we have a really hard time picking
up on fake emotion right off the bat. And I mean, obviously,
(15:48):
if you spend any degree of time with someone, you
can probably tell they're full of it, you know, But
it's that initial snap judgment where you're if you're all
smiley and bubbly, you think, oh my gosh, that person
is so happy. Are not going And we have to
remember too, when we're talking about first impressions, we're talking
about a window of seconds, if not millisecond um. And
then there's also the issue of how much alike we
(16:10):
perceive someone to be. If we feel some kind of
immediate kinship or affiliation with a person, of course that's
going to make them look even better in our eyes
because we are making those those economic reward value judgments.
And this corresponds to a n study and social cognition
were subjects were asked to form impressions of a target
(16:32):
person who was similar or dissimilar to them in terms
of attitudes and activity preferences. And it turns out that
if someone has activity interests in common with you, that
affects your liking judgments and your influences your inferences of
socially desirable traits. So you want to hang out with
somebody who has similar activity interests if their attitude is similar,
(16:54):
that affects your respect judgments and influences your inferences of
intellectually desirable traits. So if someone shares your attitude about
politics or hot dogs or whatever, you're gonna think they're
pretty smart cookie. If they like to do the same
things that you do, you're gonna want to hang out
with them, which makes sense, Like talking about my interests
are talking politics while eating hot dogs? Yeah, and if
(17:17):
if I pick up on that right away, I'm gonna
want to get to know you better. Yeah, let's eat
hot dogs together and talk about the presidential rave. But
if you are concerned at all about how accurate your
first impressions are, then there is a way that you
can't improve upon them. And this is all very much
common sense to me. This is based on a two
(17:39):
thousand nine study also published in the Journal of Psychological Science,
and essentially the researchers found that if you go out
of your way to make a more accurate first impression
to judge people more accurately. You're gonna do that. The
only downside of that is it might not mean that
(18:00):
you will like what you find. You are less likely
to come out with a positive um first impression then
you would otherwise be. Yeah, if your radar is up,
you're trying to pick up on everything. Whereas if you're
just bumping into someone in line at the grocery store,
you might think, Oh, that person the jerk, or oh,
this person seems really friendly, Whereas if you've been told like, okay,
(18:21):
you have to pick up on you know, everything about
this person as soon as you meet them, you're probably
going to be more attuned to the intricacies of their personality.
And those are the kind of situations that would probably
come up in something like a job interview or if
you you know, if you're going to an event of
some sort where you need to make a first impression
or you need to have your you know, first impression, uh,
(18:45):
gauges on more accurately than just walking down the street. Yeah,
And something else that happens in a job interview sege
is handshaking and a two thousand University of Alabama study
that a firm handshake was related positive heavily to extra
version and emotional expressiveness, but negatively to shyness and neuroticism.
There's that thing again. Um. It was also positively related
(19:09):
to openness to experience, but only for women. Yeah. The
researchers suggest that since we expect for men to have
a firmed handshake, and because handshaking going back into history
has existed as this form of agreement and camaraderie, specifically
between men, I will not kill you, right, the war
(19:31):
is over handshake? Um, then for women, now we a
firm handshake from us will sort of open open us
up in men's eyes. Right. And the researchers in the
study found that, you know, so openness to experience firm
handshake women well, more open women are perceived more favorably
(19:53):
by the the the handshake researchers in the study the
judges of handshakes. But men with a less firm handshake
we're seen as more open, and we're judged less favorably.
So men with soft handshakes seem more let's just say it,
they seem more feminine. That could be thereby our judge
(20:16):
less favorably I'm just gonna say, on a side note,
I pay attention to my handshake. I think I got
a pretty good handshake. I think I have a good
one too, just because I was also raised by a
woman who was like, oh, that man just gave me
a limp handshake, so let's let's shake hands right now.
It's pretty good. Thanks, you could tighten your grip. Wait,
you know what, I was trying to reach out a
microphone also, I, um, well, I did use my I'm
(20:39):
left handed, but I immediately reached out my right hand.
That's right, yeah, moving in a right handed world. Um,
current events side note when I mean it wasn't at
the time, but it is pertinent now. My mother was
one of our chaperones on my eighth grade Washington, d C.
Trip and Newt Gingrich met my entire class and was
shaking everybody, everybody's hands and she, my mother leans down
(20:59):
to me this like he has a lamp handshake. She
didn't like him. After that, She's like lost my vote. Yeah,
if she voted, I don't know. So something as innocuous
as a politician giving a quick handshake to your mother
could have the ramification of her, you know, creating all
of these value judgments around how he would effectively or
(21:23):
ineffectively governed. All right, you could say that that could
be an example of a horns effect of a first
impression exactly. Yeah, there's this halo effect versus horns effect
thing that comes up in the book First Impressions, What
you don't know about how others see you by and
Demo Ray and Valerie White and this is coming Good
(21:45):
Morning America ran an excerpt of this book on their website.
And apparently, when you meet someone and you get a
good first impression right off the bat, they give you
a good handshake, or they're open or extroverted, it has
a ripple effect and you make immediate judgment about how
they are in other areas. So if they are if
you judge them to be awesome right off the bat,
(22:06):
then you also probably are assuming that they're nice, you know, generous, kind, extroverted.
If you get a bad impression, like my mother did
of New Gingrich back in um, she all of a
sudden had this horrible opinion of him that he must
be weak and you know, kind of just she thought
he was icky, is what she said. Yeah, laziness is
(22:28):
a trait that comes up a lot and evaluating first
impressions positive and negative traits. Yeah, and like we talked
about earlier, it tends to color how you see that
person from then on out. And it takes a long
time to overcome a bad first impression. Whereas people forgive
you easily if if you've made a good first impression
and then the next day you're kind of cold and
(22:49):
self absorbed and kind of a jerk, people forgive you
because they think, well, this isn't in line with their characteristics.
You know, they're they're probably a good person having a
bad day. This reminds me of a it a mistake
that I made my first year of high school. See,
I was homeschooled in middle school. So the first day
of high school was a really big idea, A really
(23:10):
a really big deal, I should say to me, still
working things out in my head about it, and it
was such a big deal. And of course I bought,
you know, a new outfit for my first day of school,
but I decided that I should save this killer outfit
not for the first day, but for the second day
of school. You know, I could just like blend in
like the first day, because everybody's gonna be I really
(23:32):
thought this through because I was like, you know, there's
gonna be so much going on, why not save the
killer outfit for the second day of school when everybody
else is slacked off. Yeah, it was. It totally backfire.
I were just an unfortunate combination of clothing on the
first day of school, and by the second day I
could tell that all the popular girls had already judged
(23:54):
me as this bad dresser with a bowl cut. The
bowl cut I couldn't change. Look god it. But yeah,
and I don't think that. I don't think I recovered.
But that's that's another podcast. Well you are You know
you mentioned the popular girls making a decision about you,
and people do evaluate how you make them feel. So
maybe by dressing weird and having a bowl cut, you
(24:16):
made them feel uncomfortable and therefore did not want to
hang out with you after that because they were like,
that girl makes me feel weird. I'm glad no one
told me that when I was fifteen. Caravine, I know,
I'm just crushing crushing your self esteem. It's okay in retrospect.
It is rebounded since. But this is from that First
(24:36):
Impressions book, and people tend to seek out others who
provide them with the feelings and benefits that they desire.
So if you are open and make someone feel warm
and welcome, then they're gonna want to hang out with you.
I thought I was being friendly. Well, they're their first
impression obviously was not warm and welcoming to you, right, Um,
(24:59):
who need them anyway? Exactly? Friends? But uh yeah. So
the more you the more you listen and connect with
someone that you've just met, the more likely it is
that other people will return that same attention. And one
one big question that we haven't really addressed about first
impressions is whether or not women or men are more
(25:23):
accurate with those initial judgments. I think there is a
stereotype that women are judge e er if you will,
to use the phrase that some people hate. Uh, there's
that stereotype and also the idea that because women tend
to have higher interpersonal sensitivity, that we must form more
accurate first impressions. Um. But, according to a two thousand
(25:47):
study from the University of British Columbia published in the
journal Research in Personality, while our general first impression evaluations
tend to be more accurate, we can pick out those
large personnel the traits a little bit better than men
might be able to. But when it comes to more
specifics about who people are, really no gender difference. So
(26:09):
I think it goes back to the motivation of do
we want to form an accurate judgment of someone? What
are we looking for? Are we just judging someone solely
based on whether or not they do have a bowl
cut or whether or not that person with a bowl
cut is a nice girl. I'm sure she is still
(26:32):
still uh so I think that I think that about
covers it. Yeah, I I you know you you have
a very small window in which to make everyone like you,
which is why we need to change our Facebook profile
picture pronto. People might think we're ridiculous. If anyone, if
anyone has suggestions for I don't know, some kind of
(26:53):
really cool pose that we could do, Yeah, that could
just skyrocket us. Just as warning, I have very poor balance,
so it can't be anything that involves like standing on
one leg or so I can't like boost you onto
my shoulders would immediately I would immediately fall over. Okay,
all right, well back to the drawing boards. Then, well,
(27:13):
we have given you so much information about first impressions,
a lot of which I feel like is sort of
common sense. But I think it's comforting to know that
our first impressions do steer us, at least in the
right direction, unless it's a crazy person or someone who's neurotic,
in which case you never can tell, you know, unless
they're carrying around a lot of cats. So that's all
(27:35):
we have for you today, mom. Stuff at Discovery dot
com is where you can send your thoughts and feelings
about first impressions, and we have a couple of emails here,
the first of which is in response to a listener
email from UH from a couple of episodes ago. Okay,
(27:56):
this is from Jessica. She has some advice. She says,
I'm a thirty four years old and I'm actively engaged
in muy tai, which is tai kickboxing. At first, new
guys are generally unwilling to get into the ring with me,
but after a few times they get totally used to
it and are absolutely willing to become more regular sparring partners.
You can't forget that in a big way. They are
breaking very ingrained taboos to never hit girls. It's hard
(28:18):
for them and they don't want to feel like jerks
for now. I know it's frustrating, and I agree with
the advice to talk to your instructor about it. Sometimes
working with someone at a much lower level than you
gets annoying because you don't feel like you're getting a
workout or progressing. So ask to work with someone of
a much higher level than you from time to time,
even if they're much bigger. It's great for them to
work on their technique. And think about that when you're
(28:39):
working with people at a lower level, and you'll feel
yourself progressing too and won't get discouraged again. Just keep
it up and wait it out. Remember you're not going
to win any fight by giving up, So this is
just more place to put that into practice. Well, I
have an email here from Carrie in and this is
in response to our episode on whether or not gay
house olds are more egalitarian when it comes to things
(29:03):
like splitting up chores and all that business. And she writes,
because I'm a proudly bisexual woman who is currently in
a long term relationship with a man and points out that, uh,
none of the studies that we referenced took into account
bisexual couples. And she writes, my experience with my current
partner maybe interesting to some of your listeners. We've been
(29:24):
together for eight years and began living together after only
one year. He is the love of my life and
soul mate, but that does not change my sexuality. I
think my partner found it difficult to work out what
our roles were when we moved in together because, and
we have discussed this openly and intelligently, he admits he
thought that we would just fall into stereotypical operating norms
in terms of household chores and cleaning. At the time,
(29:47):
he worked more hours than I did, but I earned more,
so money or time wasn't always a situation, as the
one study you discussed positive. I am happy to take
responsibility for outside manly chores like mo and gardening, but
do not enjoy them, so I hire a handyman to
take care of it. My partner is a great cook
and enjoys creating new dishes and trying new recipes, so
(30:07):
he is the kitchen god. I am very grateful, but
to help us both enjoy the kitchen where we installed
a dishwasher. Oh man, that does make a big difference.
We have discussed having children and I've already decided that
as I get huge job satisfaction and he not so much,
that he would stay home with a baby and I
would go to work as soon as I was physically
able after the birth. Our misconceptions about the style of
(30:29):
our relationship was a hurdle at first, but made us
very good communicators and our relationship is so strong now
because of it. UM and she and talking about those studies,
I did find one study regarding UM gender roles and
the UM whether or not they were more egalitarian with
UM transgender couples, but bisexual couples I didn't find anything.
(30:52):
And again this is something that comes up a lot
in the podcast that there is still UM a lot
of their there there are a number of holes in
sexuality research that are starting to be filled more to
take into account more than just heater sexual homosexual couples UM.
So thanks to Carry from Australia for sending in that insight,
(31:13):
and of course if you have anything to send our way,
you can email us at Mom's Stuff at Discovery dot com.
You can find us on Facebook and look at our
lackluster profile picture, and you can also follow us on
Twitter at mom Stuff podcast and Of course, you can
read what we're up to during the week at our homesite,
how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
(31:39):
our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
Stuppork staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing
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