First impressions can affect your life course – how you manage job interviews, whether you gain friends at social gatherings, etc. A study by Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji showed that first impressions can strike us even after we think we have abandoned them. Still, however quickly and unintentionally these impressions form themselves in us, we are not mindless robots. “People have some flexibility,” says psychologist Melissa Ferguson from Cornell University, who is interested in how people form, and change, their impressions of others. She has a guy named Bob to thank for her findings. For her studies, Ferguson introduces test subjects to a fictional character named Bob. Sometimes Bob is portrayed as good, with a list of a hundred nice behaviours. When subjects find out he is convicted of an immoral act involving a child, the good impression of Bob completely flips. Other times, Bob does a hundred things making study subjects see him as a moderately nasty guy. Then it is revealed that Bob donated a kidney to a stranger. Here too, Ferguson’s subjects adjusted their opinion; they thought better of him, but still did not think well of him. “They did not flip,” she says. “A single piece of extremely negative information undoes a positive first impression, but it does not work the same way in the opposite direction. It takes more to overcome a negative first impression.”