Familiarity and First Impressions in You Only Get One Chance by Journalist Jen Kim

In “You Only Get One Chance”, journalist Jen Kim addresses the importance of first impressions and how people are categorized by others within seconds of meeting (2014). She goes on to say that first impressions are so strongly developed, that they can often make one ignore all information that is already known to them about that individual (Kim, 2014). Kim bases this assertion with research from the empirical study, “Familiarity increases the accuracy of categorizing male sexual orientation”, by Marco Brambilla, Paolo Riva, and Nicholas O. Rule, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Personality and Individual Differences (2013). Kim decently reports the methods and results of the research. Yet like many other journalists, Jen Kim neglects to inform her audience about certain aspects of the study that are important when analyzing its results. Essential information about the claim and validities of the empirical study are lost in the journal-to-journalism cycle (Morling, 2012). These minor alterations of information should drive the audience to question the accuracy of the popular press article. Both the popular press article and the empirical study make a causal claim. A causal claim is a statement that suggests one variable is the cause for the change in the second variable (Morling, 2012). Kim states that “our first judgments of people are so strong, that they often override what we are told about them,” implying that one’s first judgments causes one to disregard