There is a peculiar (0) TYRANNY exercised by first impressions, and it operates most severely in those who most consciously resist it. The experienced interviewer, schooled in the research, knows that the initial thirty seconds of a candidate's self-presentation will against every subsequent observation; she therefore attempts, with strenuous fair-mindedness, to discount what those seconds have told her. The difficulty is that the discount is itself on the original impression, which thus the entire machinery set up to correct for it. By the time the interview concludes, the candidate who faltered in the opening handshake has been judged not merely on that falter but also on the effort the interviewer made to overlook it — an effort that, paradoxically, keeps the initial present throughout. Researchers call this the *anchoring problem*, and they have numerous ingenious protocols for defeating it, most of which have produced results that are at best The deeper lesson, perhaps, is that conscious correction cannot what the unconscious has already registered; it can only lay over it a thin veneer of deliberation, the original impression in place while seeming to displace it.