Do we know when our impressions of others are valid? Evidence for realistic accuracy awareness in first impressions of personality

Do people have insight into the validity of their first impressions or accuracy awareness? Across two large interactive round-robins, those who reported having formed a more accurate impression of a specific target had (a) a more distinctive realistically accurate impression, accurately perceiving the target’s unique personality characteristics as described by the target’s self-, parent-, and peer-reports, and (b) a more normatively accurate impression, perceiving the target to be similar to what people generally tend to be like. Specifically, if a perceiver reported forming a more valid impression of a specific target, he or she had in fact formed a more realistically accurate impression of that target for all but the highest impression validity levels. In contrast, people who gen-erally reported more valid impressions were not actually more accurate in general. In sum, people are aware of when and for whom their first impressions are more realistically accurate. Keywords personality, person perception, impression formation, social interaction, hierarchical linear modeling/multilevel modeling Sometimes after meeting a person for the first time, there is a strong sense that you really understand him or her—you imme-diately feel as if you could predict his or her behavior in a vari-ety of situations, and you feel that even your first impressio