Person Perception

Abstract

“Person perception” is an element of social psychology concerning how we process information about people. The term is somewhat misleading because person perception does not deal with perception per se. Rather, it concerns social processing issues like what information we extract when we see other people, how we interpret what we see, and how this interpretation influences our subsequent behavior. Research in person perception has focused on the social and cognitive biases that influence our interpretation of others, particularly of people we do not know (rather than intimate others). For example, models of person perception can offer accounts of what we remember about the person who serves us coffee, our impression of the couple sitting behind us on the bus, and how we feel when someone in our social group performs poorly on a task. Research has highlighted the non-veridical nature of person perception, revealing a number of biases that are relied upon in order to cope with the enormous complexity of social information processing. These biases include Attribution Errors, Context Effects, and the most widely studied element of person perception: social categorization. Social categories, or stereotypes, can have a significant influence on person perception, providing a framework through which the processing of stereotype-consistent information is facilitated. Dual-process models predict the situations in which social cognition is dominated by categorization, rather than individuation. Social categories also influence our sense of identity. The tendency to identify with particular “in-groups” and denigrate “out-group” members is modeled in Social Identity Theory (see Social Identity: Us and Them) and the related Self-Categorization Theory. More recent work has focused on identifying the neural correlates of social processing, highlighting roles for prefrontal and limbic areas in the brain. These wide-ranging aspects of person perception are addressed in this article.