Salience: The First Impression Is What Counts

The remarkableness of the stimulus is the ability to “get the attention” of the subject. Intensity is one of the characteristics of salience. What happens is that, normally, we neutralize the other variables that determine salience and we only vary the intensity. You stayed as you were, right? Keep reading and we will explain what salience really consists of.

“You call my attention”

Surely you have ever met someone and said “I don’t know why but you call my attention” or “that person calls my attention a lot”. Here we are not going to talk about the first impressions that possibly all readers will know are, firstly, difficult to change and, secondly but not least, based on certain indications that stand out above the rest.

This second point is where salience comes in and the popular saying that  “the first impression is what counts”  since, despite the fact that in a regular meeting there are certain standard behaviors, the truth is that what captures attention, what generates the bias by which we recognize the other as an individual, are precisely these stimuli that present a certain salience.

We could define salience in a very colloquial way as that spring that jumps in our understanding when we meet other people and they attract our attention. Normally, we associate certain traits, such as a scathing comment, with intelligence or with impertinence or with arrogance.

Depending on our personal assessment of this trait, the person will be, at first, marked by it, no matter how much we resist. This happens unconsciously and automatically.

Why salience with some stimuli and not with others?

According to social psychology and, specifically, according to various studies about behavior in today’s Western society, there are some factors that make us stick with these stimuli and that the bias continues:

• Self-fulfilling prophecy: It sounds like street psychology but when one person places expectations on another, whatever their thinking, it will be very possible that they are fulfilled because the first impression is what counts. It is not a coincidence, but a self-fulfilling prophecy.

• Perceptual selection: The salience of some attributes with respect to others makes the rest of the other’s attitudes and aptitudes obviate, until they are adapted to our mental scheme. Although we do not want to accept it, we always select and focus on certain attributes while we blindfold ourselves to others. This sometimes gives rise to so-called expectations.

• Optimism:   Positive states of mind tend to highlight the positive points of the person who has just met in a more consistent way than in other cases since this is a state of mind that you want to preserve.

These and many other factors contribute to some people motivating us and rejecting contact with others. Knowing all these is key to not letting ourselves be overcome with the idea that the first impression is what counts since many times these stimuli that stand out negatively at first can make us refuse to meet people who are worth looking at again. , this time, with another perspective.

Being aware of all the aforementioned will allow us to expand our knowledge and not get carried away by what we automatically do, but which prevents us from discovering people as they are. We can look at them from another perspective, since there is not only one true one. Do we change our way of seeing others?