What’s your idea of a great first impression? Confidence? Charm? The ability to hold a room? Most people would say yes to all of the above, and research confirms that those things do make you likable. They just don’t make you unforgettable.
A new analysis in Psychology Today by behavioral analyst and attorney Wendy L. Patrick draws on two recent studies to parse what actually drives attraction in first meetings, and the findings are more nuanced than “just be yourself” would suggest.
The first study, by Martje Buss and colleagues, found that dominant, extroverted behavior drives popularity in group settings — networking events, social gatherings, anywhere you’re being evaluated by multiple people at once. People who take up space, lead conversations, and project confidence get noticed and get liked. That part isn’t surprising.
The Most Memorable People Usually Have This One Thing in Common, According to Psychologists
The more interesting finding comes from research by Michael Dufner and Sascha Krause, published in Psychological Science, which looked at what makes someone not just generally liked, but uniquely liked — meaning a specific person walks away from a first encounter thinking about you specifically, not just rating you favorably alongside everyone else in the room.
Dufner and Krause studied 139 unacquainted adults and tracked both agentic behaviors (dominant, confident, boastful, leading) and communal behaviors (warm, friendly, polite, benevolent). People who displayed both types were broadly popular. But the ones who were uniquely liked — pulled out from the crowd as someone their conversation partner felt a real connection with — were the ones who leaned communal. Warmth, not dominance, is what converts general approval into actual attraction.
How you apply this depends on what you’re walking into. Working a room at a professional event? Projecting confidence and taking conversational initiative will get you noticed. On a first date, or trying to make a real impression on someone you actually care about, all the assertiveness in the world won’t do what genuine warmth does. The behaviors that make you broadly appealing and the behaviors that make you memorable to one person are not the same behaviors.
There’s something almost counterintuitive about this, given how much cultural energy goes into performing confidence. Assertiveness signals status. It makes people respect you. But respect and wanting to see someone again are two different outcomes, and according to this research, only one of them reliably comes from being the most magnetic person in the room.
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