The Truth About Confident Presenting

Chapter 26. Your Introduction Forms Their First Impression

How important is an introduction? Just ask Tufts University psychologist Nalini Ambady. She and a colleague videotaped 13 graduate teaching fellows as they taught their classes. She then took three random 10-second clips from each tape, combined them into one 30-second clip for each teacher, and showed the silent clips to students who did not know the teachers. The students rated the instructors on 13 variables, such as “accepting,” “active,” “competent,” and “confident”. Ambady combined these individual scores into one rating for each instructor and then correlated that rating with the teachers’ end-of-semester evaluations from actual students.

“We were shocked at how high the correlation ...