Q&A with Arin Korkmaz ’25 PhD

A popular 1980’s advertising campaign for Head & Shoulders shampoo declared, ‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression.’ Yet other sayings warn us not to put too much stock in those initial judgments (‘never judge a book by its cover’). For social psychologist Arin Korkmaz ’25 PhD (Psychology), that tension sparked a deeper curiosity about how we form, revise, and remember our impressions of others.

In December, his dissertation was among the 40 awarded distinction, an honor given when all readers unanimously recognize the work as outstanding scholarship. The Graduate School conferred 197 PhD degrees in December. 

In a new Q&A, Korkmaz reflects on his research findings and the personal journey that led him from Istanbul to graduate studies at Yale.

Tell me more about your research and key findings.

In my research, the broad question I’m interested in is how and when we change our minds about others — and what happens when we do. We constantly learn about other individuals and social groups through many sources: our interactions, second‑hand information, stereotypes, and cultural norms. However, sometimes we change our minds (or attitudes and impressions, in more scientific terms), and sometimes we don’t. I study what happens during that process: when impressions change, where the initial impressions go; and when they don’t change, what that means for how we represent other people in our minds.

I focus especially on spontaneously activated impressions — those that spring to mind automatically when we encounter someone, such as a friend who elicits a positive reaction. I also look at how people change broader social group attitudes about race and sexual orientation when they move to different regions with different intergroup relations.

One line of my research examined how learning and memory processes shape the way we update our impressions of others — and how people can hold complex, even contradictory, positive and negative impressions at the same time. I studied how people make inferences about the role of context in someone’s behavior: when does context explain away a person’s good or bad actions? And how do those interpretations shape people’s spontaneously activated impressions?

I found that people differentially attribute behavior to people's traits and the context, and that people's spontaneously activated impressions are sensitive to these nuances. This is a response to the traditional view, which suggests that the spontaneously activated thoughts are more error-prone and cannot incorporate nuances in the learning environment.

Another project examined how we think about people after reinterpreting their behavior. I found that when people learn that someone’s negative action was actually done for a good reason, people change their negative impressions to positive as we expected. However, even though impressions, even spontaneous impressions, turn to positive, evaluations of the initial harmful behavior linger and can resurface in spontaneous thoughts. For example, when people learn that someone has harmed another person, but to save someone else they also conclude that the person has shown the capacity and capability to harm someone, which is very important for humans to keep in mind for future interactions. This could be why positivity can co-exist with harm impressions.

In hypothetical scenarios, participants continued to expect that a person who once engaged in harmful behavior (even for a good reason) might escalate a situation more readily than a stranger. This suggests that earlier impressions can continue to influence expectations even after we seemingly changed our minds about them. My research highlights that both impression stability and change are more complex and richer than previously assumed.

How did you first become interested in this topic?

Impressions are so prominent in our cultural mythos that it’s hard to ignore them. We place a lot of importance on them, as evidenced by sayings such as ‘you only have one chance to make a good first impression.’ But at the same time, we also warn each other not to rely on them (‘don’t judge a book by its cover’). That tension fascinated me.

If you search Google right now, you can find thousands of  tips about how to make a good impression. First impressions are important because they color what comes after. When someone makes a good impression on you, and then they do something negative, you might give them the benefit of the doubt because you are seeing their behavior in a different light. As a social psychologist, I’m interested in the psychological phenomenon of learning and changing your mind after that initial stage of impression formation—you formed an impression, so what now? What are the conditions that lead to impression change and stability? In almost every culture, there’s an acknowledgement that people can change and that we should forgive transgressors when they redeem themselves. How does that work?

There’s also a personal dimension. I came to Yale as an international student from Turkey who had lived in several places and experienced many cultural contexts. I’ve changed a lot, both personally and intellectually, and saw how culture shapes judgments. In my early years in the U.S., I had countless conversations with other international students about how norms differed between our cultures and how those shaped our judgments. Those experiences made me curious about how context shapes impressions — how the same behavior can be interpreted entirely differently depending on where you are or what cultural expectations you bring with you. Eventually, I found myself formally studying the very processes I had been living.

Any special mentors or collaborators that you’d like to highlight?

They say it takes a village, and I was fortunate to have a small metropolis of friends, mentors and collaborators who supported me through graduate school. My advisor, Melissa Ferguson, was amazing. She gave me space to grow intellectually, supported my pursuit of relatively large-scale projects, and modeled academic integrity, diligence, genius, and kindness. My work on the regional acculturation project required building relationships across Yale, and she backed me throughout the process.

I also benefited enormously from colleagues and friends in my lab and department. Some of my best ideas emerged from casual conversations over coffee, long walks, or talks in other departments. Yale offered such an intellectually stimulating environment, and the interdisciplinary interactions were invaluable.

What’s one thing you wish more people knew about your field of study?

That human social cognition is far more complex than we assume. Some things that we take for granted, such as remembering someone or changing our minds about them, are actually incredible feats of the human mind. We often hear people say that first impressions are rigid, simplistic, and hard to change, and that failing to update them is a flaw in human thinking.

My research suggests that when learning is strong — when the information is believable, clear, and comes from reliable experiences — impressions update. But that doesn’t mean earlier impressions disappear; they can linger and resurface later on. This seems to be a feature rather than a flaw.

Understanding why we learn what we do — why we adopt regional attitudes when we move to a new place, for example — is an important future direction for my research.

While at Yale, did you have opportunities to share your research with broader audiences?

Yes. I presented at numerous academic conferences and gave invited talks in various labs. Occasionally, I spoke to groups in adjacent fields; for example, a group at the law school was interested in my earlier work on jury decision-making.

Most of my research focuses on foundational cognitive processes, which aren’t always as intuitive for broader public audiences compared to more applied topics. But impressions are universally relatable, and people are often curious about whether impressions can change, what happens when we forgive, and how early experiences shape our evaluations.

How did you end up at Yale for graduate studies?

I began my undergraduate studies in Turkey, then transferred to the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, where I completed my undergraduate degree. I studied psychology, and also took courses in biological and cultural anthropology, which helped shape my eventual research path.

After undergrad, I returned home to Istanbul and worked in political and marketing research before returning to academia to pursue research full‑time. I then completed a master’s degree at Koç University in Istanbul before beginning my PhD at Cornell. When my advisor moved to Yale, I transferred with her and completed my dissertation here.

It was a winding path (I’ve studied at five institutions), but Yale ultimately became the place where I spent the most time in my academic career.

What are your career plans after Yale?

I’m currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. In my current position, I’m focusing on research and mentoring undergraduates, but I look forward to a future role where I can teach courses as well. Ultimately, I hope to lead a research group and continue exploring how people learn, change impressions, and navigate complex social worlds.