When we make thin-slice judgments of people—the term for the fleeting perceptions our brain creates, first coined by psychologist Nalini Ambady—our inputs are often mistaken. We’re governed by things like facial structures and expressions—the things we rely on in those thirty-four-millisecond judgments—as well as our own past experiences, which, as it usually happens, are closer to incidental peripheral noise that has no bearing on the current situation.