The admonishment about not judging a book by its cover may not be quite right according to a study in the current issue of the journal, Social Psychological and Personality Science. Most people's first impressions tend to come out quite accurate according to the study.

Jeremy Biesanz of the University of British Columbia, said that there are two ways to be right about people's personality. Generally, people are different from each other, but a perceptive person knows of instances when peole can be mostly alike -- for example, almost everyone would prefer being friendly to being quarrelsome. The more people rate another person's personality in a way typical of most everyone, the more accurate they felt their perception was. And because most people are like most people, they were indeed being accurate.

"Many important decisions are made after very brief encounters -- which job candidate to hire, which person to date, which student to accept," write the authors. "Although our first impressions are generally accurate, it is it critical for us to recognize when they may be lacking."

To arrive at their conclusions, Biesanz's research made two separate groups of more than100 people meet in a "getting-acquainted" session much like speed-dating, until the people had spoken with everyone else in the group for three minutes each. At the end of each 3-minute chat, they rated each other's personalities, and rated how well they thought their impressions "would agree with someone who knows this person very well." To establish what the person was "really" like, the researchers had people fill out their own personality reports, which were bolstered with personality ratings that came either from friends or parents.

The participants did a reasonably good job of seeing each other's personality. And the more accurate they felt, the closer their ratings to the friends' and parents' ratings. Interestingly, the participants also found the highest accuracy from people who rated themselves moderately accurate. People who were highly confident of their judgment did not fare too well relative to the moderate group.