Person Perception

Person Perception - The psychological processes by which we form impressions of other people and formulate judgements about them.

Social cognition is the study of how people process social information about other people it includes how we perceive other people and the impressions we form of them. Also how we interpret the causes of their behaviour and the attitudes we have about them.

Central Traits are personality characteristics that have a greater impact on the formation of impressions about other people because they correlate highly with other traits allowing more inferences to be drawn about a person

Impression formation

An active process (or set of processes) through which we seek to know and understand others

(Baron &Byrne, 1997, p38)

First impression refers to the influence of information that came early rather than late in a social encounter. This is also known as the primacy effect (Asch, S. E (1946) Forming impressions of personality, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290). Asch found that initial information carries greater weight than subsequent information. An example of such; a person we have just met makes an initial intelligent comment but subsequently says several things that sound not so intelligent. The early intelligent comment would carry a disproportion influence on the impression we have of this person.

Physical attractiveness heavily influences first impressions. People immediately assume that handsome and beautiful people are intelligent, healthy and have great social skills (cited in Feingold, A. (1988) Matching for attractiveness in romantic partners and same-sex friends: a meta-analysis and theoretical critique, Psychological Bulletin, 104, 226-35).

Langlois et al. (2000) conducted a meta-analysis of 102 studies, reporting that the way people looked, influenced how people perceived them and how people treated them. First impressions of physically attractive people influenced the interaction with that person for example Langlois found that people give attractive adults more visual attention, even help with directions than less attractive adults. They also found that it weren't just restricted to adults, 78% of attractive children compared to 22% of unattractive children were perceived to be above average in social skills (cited in Langlois, J. H. (2000) Maxims or Myths of Beauty? A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review, Psychological Bulletin 126: 390-423). The primacy and importance of appearance on first impressions can sometimes combine to produce a self-fulfilling prophecy, when an expectation or prophecy about how a person will behave causes the person to behave in the perceived way (as cited in Social psychology 4th Edition, 2007 p319).

Self - fulfilling prophecy is best explained by way of an example instance Snyder et al (1977) conducted an experiment using male students who were advised that they were going to talk on the phone with female students whom they had never met. The men were each given a photo of the woman they would be talking too. Some men were given pictures of an attractive woman and some