#84 Thin Slices, Big Insights

Have you ever sat on an interview panel and felt you knew whether to hire someone within minutes?

Our initial judgments are often automatic, intuitive – and surprisingly accurate.  In social psychology, a “thin slice” refers to a brief sample of someone’s behavior, from just a few seconds to five minutes. One meta-analysis of 26 studies on thin slices found that: 

• A 10-second video of interviewees greeting the panel strongly correlated with their final evaluations.

• A 20-second silent video of school teachers revealed their level of bias towards students’ work.

• A 30-second clip of research participants was enough for observers to assess four of the “Big 5” personality traits:  extraversion, agreeableness, openness and conscientiousness.

While the researchers assert that thin-slice assessments are reliable due to the “real-world, rich, social knowledge that people have acquired,” they do share words of caution, including that accuracy is higher when judging people from similar cultures.