Why do we feel aversion toward people from the first meeting?

Sometimes, familiar features or simple details in a stranger's face are enough to evoke memories associated with people we have known before, even if we do not clearly perceive this resemblance.

Psychology professor David Ludden explains in "Psychology Today" magazine that we may judge strangers based on how much they resemble people we know. This resemblance may be linked to positive or negative experiences that influence our feelings toward the new person.

In a study conducted at New York University and published in 2018 in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences," researchers found that participants were less willing to trust strangers whose faces resembled people who had previously betrayed their trust during a financial experiment.

These results indicate that our aversion to a person may be linked to a past experience, even if we are not conscious of this connection.

Features that may suggest anger

Facial expressions do not always reflect the true feelings of the person; someone might look angry because of the shape of their eyebrows or the corners of their mouth, even though they are not feeling angry at all.

According to Ludden, some features may lead us to interpret a person's face as angry or unfriendly, so we form a negative impression of them before we even speak to them.

Daily circumstances also affect a person's appearance and the way they interact. Psychology researcher Alexander Todorov explains in an interview with the American magazine "Time" that exhaustion or having a bad day might make a person appear more aloof or less responsive to others.

However, we may forget that these expressions are temporary and interpret them as fixed traits in the personality of someone we are meeting for the first time.

Does the tone of voice play a role?

The reason for the aversion might not be the person's words, but their tone of voice and way of speaking. The voice can influence our impression of the speaker, even before we have the chance to get to know them.

According to "Smithsonian" magazine, researchers conducted an experiment in which they recorded the voices of about 60 people, then cut out the word "hello" from the recordings. More than 300 participants listened to the clips and rated the speakers in terms of friendliness and trustworthiness, without seeing them.

The results showed that listeners formed similar impressions of some speakers, as certain voices seemed friendlier and more trustworthy than others.

But these impressions do not necessarily mean that those with pleasant voices are more honest or trustworthy; the tone of voice alone is not enough to judge a person's character.

Are our first impressions always accurate?

We may feel confident in our judgment of a person from the first moment, but this confidence does not necessarily mean that we have understood their personality correctly.

In three studies published by researchers, including Daniel Ames, in the "Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin," participants formed impressions of people through photos and video clips, and then the researchers evaluated the accuracy of their judgments.

The results showed that participants were not always able to tell when their judgments were correct or incorrect, and their confidence in some impressions was not a reliable indicator of their accuracy.

This means that our feeling that someone is unfriendly does not necessarily prove that they are; subsequent situations may reveal different aspects of their personality.

How do we deal with the feeling of aversion?

We are not required to get along with everyone or to build close relationships with everyone we meet. It is our right to maintain a comfortable distance in dealing with others, but it is also useful not to turn a first impression into a final judgment.

Repeating meetings and observing actual behavior may help us understand the person better and determine whether our reservation is justified or the result of a past experience or an inaccurate interpretation of their expressions.

In the end, our feeling toward a person may change over time, and interacting with them may remain within the bounds of friendliness and respect. Feeling uncomfortable with someone does not necessarily mean they have a flaw, just as we are not obligated to invent negative traits in them to justify our lack of desire to get close to them.