What First Impressions in the West Versus the Gulf Really Mean

By Corina Goetz, David De Cremer, Sufian Hwedi, and Emilios Galariotis

Western business executives interested in working in the Gulf need to understand that what they value the most may not be what matters most.

In Western business cultures, first impressions follow a logic that most of us understand instinctively: Be confident. Be clear. Demonstrate competence. Show your value. In the West, everyone understands this because they believe that first impressions are about yourself.

Science supports this intuition. Before you say a word, people have often decided a lot about you. In the first few seconds of meeting someone, rapid, unconscious judgments shape how you’re perceived, before slower, more deliberate reasoning has time to intervene (often to justify rather than challenge the initial perception). We are hardly aware that this is happening. Psychologists refer to this as first impression bias: a limitation in human information processing that leads us to draw quick and incomplete conclusions about others based on the first information we perceive (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).

The consequences are significant. First impression bias affects hiring decisions, leadership credibility, idea adoption, and deal-making. Once an initial impression takes hold, it becomes remarkably resistant to change. Over time, it evolves into what researchers call the halo effect: a dynamic in which an early positive or negative judgment colors how everything else about a person is interpreted (Swider, Harris, & Gong, 2022). Competence, trustworthiness, intelligence, and even ethics get filtered through that first lens.

In Western business settings, this bias is well understood—and, to a large extent, accepted. We train people to “make a strong first impression,” knowing full well that if they do, the rest of the relationship becomes easier. But this logic does not travel well.

When First Impressions Follow a Different Logic

In Gulf business cultures, first impressions matter just as much—but they follow a fundamentally different logic, one that Western professionals cannot intuit from their own experience.

Consider the following example: “The CEO left a meeting in Dubai absolutely convinced he had crushed it. The family office principal had been warm, engaged, and asked detailed questions. The conversation lasted over an hour—far beyond the scheduled thirty minutes. At one point, the principal laughed at something the CEO said and asked about his family. “I’ve done thousands of these meetings,” the CEO said over coffee that evening. “That was one of the best. We really connected. I’m expecting the contract within two weeks.” Six weeks later, his emails went unanswered. Three months after that, the “warm connection” had gone completely cold. No explanation. No feedback. Just silence—so complete it felt as if the meeting had never happened. “What the hell went wrong?” He asked. “I’ve replied to that meeting a hundred times. I did everything right.”

Indeed, he did everything right, at least by Western standards. What he did not realize was that while he was focused on demonstrating expertise, showcasing his track record, and building what he believed was rapport, the family office principal was evaluating something entirely different—something the CEO did not even know could be evaluated. And by the time the coffee arrived, that evaluation was already complete.

The Question You Don’t Know You’re Being Asked

Here is what makes first impressions in the Gulf so treacherous. Western executives often assume they are being evaluated on questions like:

• Is this person credible?
• Can they deliver results?
• Do they understand our business?

In reality, Gulf decision-makers are often asking a different question altogether:

• Is this person safe?

“Safe” does not mean risk-free in a technical sense. It means safe for reputation. Safe for networks. Safe for judgment. It is about what associating with you signals to others—and whether introducing you into their relational ecosystem reflects well on them and does not disrupt harmony. If you don’t know this is the question, you cannot possibly answer it correctly.

And here is the crucial difference: answering that question incorrectly in the Gulf does not lead to rejection. It leads to warmth without business. Hospitality without opportunity. Promising conversations that quietly evaporate into permanent silence. Mistakes could be about timing or tone. Or about gestures so subtle most Western professionals would never register them. But Gulf decision-makers notice—not always consciously, but instinctively. In the same way you would notice if someone stood too close in an elevator, held eye contact for too long, or laughed at the wrong moment. You might struggle to articulate what felt off. But you would know something was not quite right.

It is important to emphasize that the question of safety is rarely distributed evenly across all foreign presences in the Gulf. It sharpens considerably around one particular boundary: proximity to authority and decision-making power. This is not incidental—it reflects the region’s demographic and institutional reality. In the UAE and Qatar, for example, nationals make up roughly 11 percent of the population, one of the most extreme demographic inversions of any country in the world. The economies of these states were built, and continue to run, largely on foreign expertise and labor. Yet citizenship, land ownership, and the upper tiers of institutional authority remain tightly reserved for nationals. Naturalization in the UAE was historically near-impossible, limited almost exclusively to those with direct family ties to Emiratis, and even the reforms introduced in 2021 and 2022 that opened narrow pathways for investors and specialized talent still generally prohibit holding a second passport. Land ownership follows a similar pattern: some emirates restrict property ownership entirely to UAE and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nationals, while others have only recently and partially opened select zones to foreign buyers. The organizational hierarchies visible across many Gulf institutions—national ownership and board leadership, expatriate directors and senior technical staff beneath them, and a broader multinational workforce below that—reflect this same structure. Openness to outside expertise and firm retention of local authority are not in tension; they are two halves of the same deliberate arrangement. Understood this way, the safety being evaluated in a first meeting is not a general referendum on trustworthiness. It is a more specific question: can this person be brought close to decision-making authority without disturbing a system built, quite explicitly, to keep that authority local?

That is how cultural violations work in the Gulf. They do not announce themselves as errors. They simply register as “this person does not quite understand.” And once that registers—even subconsciously—everything else gets filtered through that lens. Your expertise becomes irrelevant if you do not understand the context. Your track record does not matter if you cannot be trusted with someone’s network. Your solution is uninteresting if you are too risky to introduce to others.

Why Silence Is the Signal

This is what makes Gulf first impressions especially dangerous for Western professionals.

In Western business cultures, mistakes usually come with feedback. If something does not work, you are told—directly or indirectly. A rejection email, a declined proposal, or even blunt criticism signals that something failed.

In the Gulf, mistakes are met with silence. Not because people are passive. Not because they are conflict-avoidant. But because telling you would itself violate the very cultural norms you have already demonstrated you do not understand. So instead of feedback, you get warmth. Instead of rejection, you get “Inshallah, we will be in touch.” Instead of closure, you get months of unanswered follow-ups while you wonder what happened. Western professionals often leave these meetings thinking that went really well. What they may not realize is that the decision was already made—and politely concealed.

In the Gulf, mistakes are met with silence. Not because people are passive. Not because they are conflict-avoidant. But because telling you would itself violate the very cultural norms you have already demonstrated you do not understand.

Interestingly, this pattern of avoidance is not unique to business settings, and it is not a calculated negotiating tactic. It extends a communication norm present throughout Gulf and wider Arab social life. The phrase inshallah—literally “God willing”—is often used far beyond its religious meaning, as a softened way to decline or defer a request without saying a direct no. It appears in family life and social obligations long before it ever surfaces in a boardroom: in requests for money, favors, invitations, or commitments people are not certain they want to make. Children in these cultures are typically raised to treat courtesy and indirectness as the default way of managing an uncomfortable request, rather than bluntness. Because of this, most Gulf professionals do not switch into a separate, more direct register when they enter a business setting—there is no clearly bounded “professional mode” distinct from social courtesy, as many Western business cultures maintain. This is precisely what makes the silence so easy to misread. To an outsider trained to expect a boundary between social politeness and professional directness, the ambiguity feels strange. To someone raised inside the norm, there is no ambiguity at all.

As such, in the Gulf, warmth does not signal approval! Decision-makers will be gracious to you even when they have already decided you are not someone they want in their network. They will be hospitable even when they have concluded you do not understand how things work. They will be kind even when the relationship is already over. Because that is the culture. So, you mistake kindness for interest. Hospitality for opportunity. Politeness for progress. The painful conclusion is that the deal was dead. You just did not know it yet.

First Impressions That Travel Through Invisible Networks

What makes this dynamic especially consequential is that your first impression in the Gulf rarely stays contained to one meeting. Reputation travels—quietly, informally, and invisibly. The person you did not impress mentions you to a colleague. The assistant you interacted with shares an impression with someone else. The network you did not know you were being evaluated for forms an opinion before you ever enter the room. Your reputation often arrives before you do.

This is why many Western executives expanding into the Gulf find themselves stuck in a frustrating pattern: great meetings that lead nowhere, warm relationships that never convert, repeated assurances followed by silence. They blame the market, the timing, or internal politics. When the real issue is simpler—and harder to see. The first impression they thought they made is not the first impression that was received.

What This Means for Global Leaders

If you are preparing for Gulf meetings, planning regional expansion, or trying to understand why your efforts are not generating traction, here is the uncomfortable truth: “You are likely failing evaluations you do not know are happening. Sending signals you do not know you are sending. Making mistakes you do not know are mistakes. And the people evaluating you are too polite to tell you.”

Understanding cross-cultural differences in first impressions is not about becoming less authentic or more performative. It is about recognizing that what signals credibility, safety, and trust varies considerably across cultures—and that success depends on answering the right question, not just answering well. In a global business environment, the greatest risk is not making a bad first impression. It is confidently believing you made a good one—when, in fact, you did not.

About the Authors

Corina Goetz is a London-based cultural advisor and strategist who has spent more than two decades working at the intersection of hospitality, power, and culture across Europe and the Gulf. Her focused mission is to help Western institutions understand how the Arab world actually works, beyond protocol, checklists, and preconceptions. Her work is grounded in the belief that cultural fluency is not learned through rules or scripts, but through judgment, adaptability, and lived understanding. She advises executives, institutions, and brands engaging with the Gulf on how to build credibility, avoid costly missteps, and operate with cultural intelligence in environments where trust, perception, and context matter as much as strategy.

David De Cremer is a chaired research professor at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM, Saudi Arabia), a research affiliate at MIT (Center for Collective Intelligence) and Yale Law School (Justice Collaboratory), and an honorary fellow at St. Edmunds College, University of Cambridge. He is the founder of the Center on AI Technology for Humankind in Singapore and is named one of the World’s top 30 management gurus and speakers by the organization GlobalGurus, is on the “Thinkers50 list of 30 next-generation business thinkers,” and is continuously included in the World Top 2% of scientists. He is a best-selling author with his new book “The AI-savvy leader: 9 Ways to Take Back Control and Make AI Work”, winner of the Outstanding Literature Award (category leadership) in the US and included in the Forbes list of top 10 AI books in 2024.

Sufian Hwedi is the Communications Manager for the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University, USA, where he oversees external communications, media relations, and social media strategy. His career spans higher education, start-ups, and digital media, with a focus on crafting communications that resonate across diverse audiences and cultural contexts. He has developed campaigns reaching tens of millions of people and collaborates with leaders and researchers at the intersection of communication and emerging technology. He brings a communicator’s perspective to questions of how messages are received across cultural lines.

Emilios Galariotis obtained his PhD from Durham University Business School (UK) and his HDR from the University of Nantes in France. He is a Full Professor of Finance at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), in Saudi Arabia. He is also a member of the management board of the Greek tax and customs authority, IAPR (Independent Authority for Public Revenue) of the Hellenic Republic. His research has been published, among many others, in the Journal of Corporate Finance, British Journal of Management, Journal of Business Ethics, European Journal of Operational Research, and the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organisation.

References

1. Nisbett, R.E. and Wilson, T.D. (1977). The Halo Effect: Evidence for Unconscious Alteration of Judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(4), p. 250-256.

2. Swider, B., Harris, T.B. and Gong, Q. (2022). First Impression Effects in Organizational Psychology. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(3), p. 346-369.