New York: Worth.Īn engaging and very accessible introduction to social psychology in general, covering all aspects of person perception. Finally, Fiske and Taylor 2017 links cognitive processes, such as attention and memory, to person perception issues, such as biases, stereotypes and prejudice.Īronson, E. Smith and Mackie 2014 is a more conventional textbook, clearly presenting up-to-date and classic social psychology, with an emphasis on person perception. Moskowitz 2005 provides a similar overview with good examples, suitable for more advanced readers. (There are many previous editions to this textbook, all of which are worthwhile.) Although highly accessible, Aronson 2018 provides important empirical examples and real-world applications of theory. An early-21st-century classic, Aronson 2018 is the most readable introduction to social psychology available, with chapters dealing with person perception issues like attributions and social categorization. The four listed here are particularly good examples. Most social psychology textbooks will cover person perception in some depth, as this topic is at the heart of social cognition. These wide-ranging aspects of person perception are addressed in this article. More recent work has focused on identifying the neural correlates of social processing, highlighting roles for prefrontal and limbic areas in the brain. 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.

Social categories also influence our sense of identity. Dual-process models predict the situations in which social cognition is dominated by categorization, rather than individuation. 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. These biases include Attribution Errors, Context Effects, and the most widely studied element of person perception: social categorization. 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. 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 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). 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. The term is somewhat misleading because person perception does not deal with perception per se. “Person perception” is an element of social psychology concerning how we process information about people.

Perception definition literature