first impression
one’s initial perception of another person, typically involving a positive or negative evaluation as well as a sense of physical and psychological characteristics. Such impressions are based on the earliest information received about a person, often through a direct encounter, and tend to persist, even in the face of later information that outside observers would consider inconsistent with the initial perception. That is, there is a primacy effect in the impression formation. Some theoretical analyses account for this effect by holding that the first received information is given greater weight in the perceiver’s mind than is the later information; others propose that the initial information shapes the meaning subsequently given to the later information.