Person Perception and Interpersonal Perception: Bridging the Gap

Abstract

Ever since Asch's (1946) classic experiments on impression formation, research on person perception has focused on what we might call perceiver variables-examining ways that social perceivers utilize information about a target person in the course of forming a first impression or making some judgment or decision about that person. The information available to the perceivers could be in any of several forms-trait adjectives characterizing the target's personality; photographs; descriptions of the person's behaviors; videotaped portrayals; and presentations of nonverbal displays (face, hands, etc.). Anyone familiar with the social psychological literature knows that this has been an extremely productive research enterprise for many years. The range of topics and issues investigated in this domain is impressively broad. Still, all of the work addresses, in one way or another, one central question: What does the perceiver do with that information? As complex as the answers to that question might be, it is in this sense that the study of person perception can be viewed as having narrowly defined its subject matter. In his book, Interpersonal Perception: A Social Relations Analysis, David Kenny argues that, by focusing so heavily on perceiver processing, the traditional approach has ignored the interpersonal aspects of social perception. People perceive one another during mutually responsive, ongoing interactions, not simply by processing static information describing others. Moreover, the same time they are forming impressions of others, they are aware that those others are engaged in that very process themselves. The interactants are evaluating one another's personality traits, the degree of similarity between them, and, at a fundamental level, whether they like one another. Kenny not only argues that the study of social perception must recognize and include this interpersonal quality, he has devised a methodology for doing so. This he calls the social relations model (SRM). SRM is a research paradigm designed to decompose the contributions of various components of perceivers' judgments of target persons. Subjects in a typical SRM study serve as both perceivers and targets, basing their ratings on their knowledge of one another. Several different designs can be used in SRM research. In a round-robin design, subjects interact with and then rate one another. Each subject rates all of the other subjects, so each subject is both a perceiver of the other subjects and a target for the other subjects. In a block design, subjects are divided into two groups, or blocks, and each subject in one block rates all of the subjects in the other block but not in his or her own block, and vice versa. Thus, in a block design, each subject also serves as both a perceiver and a target, but only in relation to subjects in the other block. In a half-block design, perceivers and targets are different groups of people. Regardless of design, the basic data consist of ratings on a given attribute. The dependent measure can be any type of ratings requested by the experimenter-ratings of others on some attribute (traitjudgments), evaluativejudgments (e.g., liking) about one another, ratings by the individual perceivers of how they think they are seen by each of the other participants (what Kenny calls meta-perception), and so forth. Whatever the measure, the ratings can be organized in a Perceiver x Target data matrix in which each row represents a given perceiver' s ratings of each target person and each column represents the ratings made by the various perceivers of a given target. The SRM analysis entails partitioning the variance included in these ratings into three basic effects-perceiver, target, and relationship components. The perceiver effect refers to variation in the means of perceivers' ratings across targets (the row means of Interpersonal Perception: A Social Relations Analysis, David A. Kenny, 1994, New York: Guilford Press.