Notes

Person Perception

• Person perception is the process of forming impressions of others.
• Perceptions of others can be influenced by a variety of factors, including physical appearance. People tend to attribute desirable characteristics such as sociable, friendly, poised, warm, competent, and well adjusted to those who are good looking. People use social schemas, organized clusters of ideas about categories of social events and people, to categorize people into types.
• Stereotyping is a normal cognitive process involving widely held social schemas that lead people to expect that others will have certain characteristics because of their membership in a specific group. Gender, ethnic, and occupational stereotypes are common.
• Person perception is a subjective process. Stereotypes may lead people to see what they expect to see and to overestimate how often they see it (illusory correlation).
• Evolutionary psychologists argue that many biases in person perception were adaptive in our ancestral past, for example, automatically categorizing others may reflect the primitive need to quickly separate friend from foe.

Links

• Psychology 305: Social Psychology - 3rd year Social Psychology course outline and online materials

References

Myers, D. G. (2001). Social Psychology (Ch. 18). In D. G. Myers (2001). Psychology (6th ed.) (pp. 643-688). New York: Worth.

Westen, D., Burton, L., & Kowalski, R. (2006). Psychology. Australian and New Zealand Edition. Queensland: Wiley.