Everyone wants to make a good first impression, but how important are snap judgments in the long run? Very, say communications researchers Artemio Ramirez and Mike Sunnafrank, who found that 【B1】______ . They randomly paired 164 college freshmen in a communications class, let them chat for three, six or 10 minutes and then asked them to predict the sort of relationship they would have, ranging from casual acquaintance to close friend. At the end of the nine-week course, 【B2】______ . Their findings, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships: Students who reported a positive impression after the initial meeting were significantly more likely to have developed a friendly relationship after nine weeks, even if 【B3】______ . 'In as quick as three minutes, people are solidifying original impressions in their heads, and nine weeks down the road it's having an effect,' says Ramirez, an assistant professor of communications at Ohio State University. Ramirez and Sunnafrank used the Predicted Outcome Value Theory as a basis for their experiment. The theory, developed by Sunnafrank in 1986, says that 【B4】______ and try the hardest to develop relationships that they expect to be the most rewarding. 'It's a reward-cost analysis that people go through, and they probably do it on a very subconscious level,' says Sunnafrank, a communications professor at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. Students' predictions were better indicators of how close they would actually be after nine weeks than how similar the students were or even how much they said they liked each other. This was because the predictions took into account not only students' opinions of their partners but also 【B5】______ . 'It surprised us that after nine weeks we were still finding some pretty powerful effects, suggesting that there's a lasting importance in what happens in the first few minutes,' Ramirez says. Though it is impossible to get to know everyone well, Sunnafrank says, results suggest that some people who make unfavorable first impressions will suffer. 'Perhaps we need to learn a little better to give people the opportunity to overcome first impressions, because I think we are making snap judgments based on such limited impressions that we are cutting off most of the people we meet.'