What are other people like? How do we decide if someone is friendly, honest or clever? What assumptions do we develop about them and what explanations do we give for their behaviour? The Perception of People examines key topics in psychology to explore how we make sense of other people (and ourselves). Do our decisions result from careful consideration and a desire to produce an accurate perception? Or do we jump to conclusions in our judgements and rely on expectations and stereotypes? To answer these questions the book examines models of person perception and provides an up-to-date and detailed account of the central psychological research in this area, focusing in particular on the social cognitive approach. It also considers and reflects on the involvement of culture in cognition, and includes coverage of relevant research in culture and language that influence the way we think and speak about others. As well as providing a valuable text in social psychology, The Perception of People also offers a direction for the integration of ideas from cognitive and social psychology with those of cultural psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy and social history. Clear explanation of modern research is placed in historical and cultural context to provide a fuller understanding of how psychologists have worked to understand how people interpret the world around them and make sense of the people within it. Ideal reading for students of social psychology, this engaging text will also be useful in subject areas such as communication studies and media studies, where the perception of people is highly relevant.

Person perception is of great importance in everyday life and human science. Judgment of other people's characteristics and intentions is important for suc cessfully planning actions within a social environment. Questions about the formation of impressions and causal attributions are central to social psychology and the study of diagnostic judgment formation. The field of per son perception deals with questions of how impression formation proceeds, what characteristics and intentions are attributed to other people, and how preformed schemata and stereotypes influence people's first impressions. Research on person perception developed rapidly after the Second World War. In the 1950s the precision and accuracy of person perception received special interest, but the problems concerning whether an individual's assessment of another personality is exact or not could not be solved. Another approach, which began in the 1940s and was derived from the Gestalt psychological tradi tion, dealt with impression formation based on selected social cues. This ap proach, which proved to be very useful, had considerable influence on both the research methods and the theoretical orientation of the research work. On the one hand, by using a combination of individual cues (like physical characteris tics) researchers tried to ascertain how an impression of a person was formed. On the other hand, the Gestalt psychological orientation led to an interest in the process of person perception, which in the last 10 years has concentrated on questions concerning information reception and processing.

Life becomes difficult for the judges of others when they are presented with a number of facts about someone which all point in different directions, or which point in no direction at all. Originally published in 1984, this volume brings together research on four major issues involved in judging people: the relationship between person perception and personality; inference from multiple cues; methodology of measuring accuracy of perception; and selection for employment. These issues are not only of increasing importance in the study of psychology today, they are also of central relevance to social and business conduct. This edited collection will be a valuable resource for the student of either.

As the general notion of cognition has recently broadened to include its embodied nature, researchers' accounts of perception have increasingly come to include the body's special status as a window on the world and to accommodate the specific perceptual requirements for identifying, interpreting, and interacting with other bodies. This volume presents a comprehensive overview of the rapid progress that has been made in understanding the human body and its relationship to perception. It will help to unify the relevant research from several independent areas of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience and facilitate the development of an integrated framework for the study of human-body perception.

A groundbreaking popular psychology book that explores the deep connection between our body and our brain. Over decades of study, University of Virginia psychologist Dennis Proffitt has shown that we are each living our own personal version of Gulliver’s Travels, where the size and shape of the things we see are scaled to the size of our bodies, and our ability to interact with them. Stairs look less steep as dieters lose weight, baseballs grow bigger the better players hit, hills look less daunting if you’re standing next to a close friend, and learning happens faster when you can talk with your hands. Written with journalist Drake Baer, Perception marries academic rigor with mainstream accessibility. The research presented and the personalities profiled will show what it means to not only have, but be, your unique human body. The positive ramifications of viewing ourselves from this embodied perspective include greater athletic, academic, and professional achievement, more nourishing relationships, and greater personal well-being. The better we can understand what our bodies are—what they excel at, what they need, what they must avoid—the better we can live our lives.

Originally published in 1979, Perceiving Others is an excellent, short introduction to the area of social psychology known as ‘person perception’, ‘social perception’ or ‘impression formation’ – how people interpret each others’ moods, predict each others’ behaviour and sum up each others’ characters. The way people see each other determines the way they behave towards each other making the study of ‘person perception’ essential to the understanding of social behaviour. Mark Cook poses three questions about how people form opinions of others: what are the processes involved, what information is used and how, and how accurate are they? He provides an answer to these questions in the three main sections of the book, giving a comprehensive survey of the theory and research arising from the issues involved. The topics covered include the meaning of trait descriptions, intuition, social skill and non-verbal communication, the impression formation paradigm, stereotypes, implicit personality theories, attribution theory, Cronbach’s components and psychiatric diagnosis. By drawing many of his illustrations from everyday encounters, the author effectively bridges the gap between theory and reality to create a thoroughly readable and comprehensible study.