The first impressions we form of unfamiliar others can often guide many important decisions such as whether someone is guilty of a crime or the severity of their sentence, even in the presence of more relevant information. While most of the current work in this context has focused on their impact during trial proceedings and sentencing, little is known about the potential impact of first impressions following a guilty sentence and the success of the subsequent reintegration into society. Here, we used a data-driven approach to address this question by first collecting unconstrained spontaneous impressions from two groups of perceivers – one group believed that the identities they were presented with had received a prison sentence, whereas the other received no additional semantic information (Study 1). This then allowed us to establish the most prevalent traits people refer to when describing their first impressions in this context and to reveal the underlying structure of these impressions using an Exploratory Factor Analysis (Study 2). We find a substantial negative shift in social evaluation following the knowledge of a prison sentence, both in terms of spontaneous descriptions and specific trait ratings. However, this additional contextual information did not affect the underlying structure of first impressions. These findings support social evaluation theories arguing for a more complex interplay between bottom-up visual and top-down semantic or contextual cues during the formation of facial first impressions but also reveal important constraints to the impact of such cues on the core impression formation processes.

我们对不熟悉的人形成的第一印象通常可以指导许多重要的决定，例如某人是否犯罪或刑罚的严重程度，即使存在更多相关信息。虽然目前这方面的大部分工作都集中在审判程序和量刑期间的影响，但人们对有罪判决后第一印象的潜在影响以及随后成功重新融入社会的情况知之甚少。在这里，我们使用数据驱动的方法来解决这个问题，首先从两组感知者那里收集不受约束的自发印象——一组认为他们所呈现的身份已被判入狱，而另一组则没有收到额外的语义信息（研究1）。这使我们能够确定人们在描述这种情况下的第一印象时所提到的最普遍的特征，并使用探索性因素分析（研究 2）揭示这些印象的潜在结构。我们发现，在得知入狱后，社会评价发生了重大的负面转变，无论是在自发描述还是在具体特征评分方面。然而，这些额外的上下文信息并没有影响第一印象的基本结构。这些发现支持社会评价理论，认为在面部第一印象形成过程中自下而上的视觉和自上而下的语义或上下文线索之间存在更复杂的相互作用，但也揭示了这些线索对核心印象形成过程影响的重要限制。