Half a Minute

Long ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece in the NewYorker that my wife and I found extremely provocative* (i.e in a thought-provoking sense). It was called the The New-Boy Network: What do job interviews really tell us. (As with much of Gladwell's work, I think this evolved into a book - Blink - although since I have not read Blink, I am not sure.)

In the NewYorker article Gladwell talks about how you could take shorter and shorter video slices of a teacher in a front of a class, and you could even turn the sound off, and for the most part anyone could tell within seconds if the teacher was 'effective' or not.

Well,.... today I was looking for something else, and quite by accident ran into the article (or one of the articles) Gladwell was talking about.

Half a minute: Predicting teacher evaluations from thin slices of nonverbal behavior and physical attractiveness.
Ambady, Nalini; Rosenthal, Robert
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 64(3), Mar 1993, 431-441.

The article (based on Ambady's doctoral research) was a really interesting read. Here is what they say about college teachers.

Specifically, teachers who were rated higher by their students were judged to be significantly more optimistic, confident, dominant, active, enthusiastic, likable, warm, competent, and supportive on the basis of their nonverbal behavior.

What I found most interesting was how this compares with high school teachers (as judged by a principal)

Specifically, teachers who were rated higher were judged to be significantly more supportive, likable, accepting, attentive, enthusiastic, warm, and optimistic on the basis of their nonverbal behavior.

(By the way, if it is any consolation, the correlation between principal evaluation and physical attractiveness was -0.18. )

Notice how "confident" and "dominant" don't appear on the high-school teacher list?

As interesting as all this is, I seriously doubt if any student (esp. a high school student) wants a teacher making a judgement about them on the basis of their first meeting.



*I do, by and large, agree with Gladwell's point of view in the original article. I have worked for a company that takes its job interviews very seriously. A successful candidate must run a gauntlet of 6 or more 1-on-1 interviews, each lasting an hour. My experience has been that good candidates draw you into a love-bubble within the first 5 minutes. The next 55 minutes is really you, as the interviewer, doing your due-diligence to make sure your initial impressions are well founded. Very occasionally, it is the other way around - an interview starts badly, and your last 55 minutes is spent changing your mind. But that usually requires another 30 minutes pondering over the interview, often in conversation with someone else, before you are willing to give up your initial judgement.