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Factors That Affect Our Perception of Someone

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Shereen Lehman, MS, is a healthcare journalist and fact checker. She has co-authored two books for the popular Dummies Series (as Shereen Jegtvig).

How We Form Perceptions of Somone

• Social Categorization
• Potential Pitfalls

Implicit Personality Theories

Whenever we form a perception of someone, a number of processes allow us to make quick decisions that help us navigate our social worlds. Person perception is a term used in social psychology to describe the mental processes that we use to form impressions of other people. This includes not just how we form these impressions, but the different conclusions we make about other people based on our impressions.

Consider how often you make this kind of judgment every day. When you meet with a new co-worker, you begin to develop an initial impression of this person. When you visit the grocery store after work, you form an impression of the cashier, even though you know very little about them.

At a Glance

Various factors, including the situation, past experiences, and societal expectations can influence our perception of someone. Person perception allows us to make snap judgments and decisions but can lead to biased or stereotyped perceptions of others.

Let's take a closer look at how person perception works and its impact on our daily interactions.

Obviously, person perception is a very subjective process that can be affected by many variables. Factors that can influence the impressions you form of other people include:

• The characteristics of the person you are observing
• The context of the situation
• Your own personal traits
• Your past experiences

Social Norms and Role Expectations

People often form impressions of others very quickly, with only minimal information. We frequently base our impressions on the roles and social norms we expect from people.

For example, you might form an impression of a city bus driver based on how you would anticipate a person in that role to behave, considering individual personality characteristics only after you have formed this initial impression.

Physical Cues

Physical cues can also play an important role. If you see a woman dressed in a professional-looking suit, you might immediately assume that she works in a formal setting, perhaps at a law firm or bank.

The salience of the information we perceive is also important. Generally, we tend to focus on the most obvious points rather than noting background information.

The more novel or obvious a factor is, the more likely we are to focus on it. If you see a woman dressed in a tailored suit with her hair styled in a bright pink mohawk, you are likely to pay more attention to her unusual hairstyle than her sensible business attire.

How Social Categorization Affects Your Perception of Someone

One of the mental shortcuts we use in person perception is social categorization. In this process, we mentally categorize people into different groups based on common characteristics.

Sometimes, this process occurs consciously, but for the most part, social categorizations happen automatically and unconsciously. The most common social categories are age, gender, occupation, and race.

Pitfalls of Social Categorization

As with many mental shortcuts, social categorization has positive and negative aspects. On the plus side, social categorization allows you to make rapid judgments. Realistically, you simply do not have time to get to know every person you come into contact with.

Social categorization allows you to make decisions and establish expectations of how people will behave quickly, allowing you to focus on other things. Unfortunately, this can also lead to errors, as well as to stereotyping or even prejudice .

Imagine that you are getting on a bus. There are only two seats available. One is next to a petite, elderly woman; the other is next to a burly, grim-faced man. Based on your immediate impression, you sit next to the elderly woman, who, unfortunately, turns out to be quite skilled at picking pockets.

Because of social categorization, you immediately judged the woman as harmless and the man as threatening, leading to the loss of your wallet. While social categorization can be useful at times, it can also lead to these kinds of misjudgments.

An implicit personality theory is a collection of beliefs and assumptions about how certain traits are linked to other characteristics and behaviors. Once we know something about a cardinal trait or a primary trait that makes up the core of a person's personality, we assume that the person also exhibits other traits commonly linked to that key characteristic.

For example, if you observe that a new co-worker is very happy , you might immediately assume that they are also friendly, kind, and generous. As with social categorization, implicit personality theories help people make judgments quickly but can also contribute to stereotyping and errors.

What This Means For You

There are many factors that affect our perceptions of someone, including the situation, individual characteristics, our personality traits, and our past experiences. Two common tactics that can influence how we perceive others include social categorization and our own implicit personality theories.

Becoming more aware of how these processes work and their shortcomings can help ensure that you make accurate (and fair) assessments of others.

Brooks JA, Freeman JB. Neuroimaging of person perception: A social-visual interface . Neurosci Lett. 2019;693:40-43. doi:10.1016/j.neulet.2017.12.046

Young AW, Bruce V. Understanding person perception . Br J Psychol. 2011;102(4):959-974. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02045.x

Stolier RM, Freeman JB. A neural mechanism of social categorization . J Neurosci. 2017;37(23):5711-5721. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3334-16.2017

Freeman JB, Johnson KL. More than meets the eye: Split-second social perception . Trends Cogn Sci (Regul Ed) . 2016;20(5):362-374. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2016.03.003

Noguchi K, Kamada A, Shrira I. Cultural differences in the primacy effect for person perception . Int J Psychol. 2014;49(3):208-210. doi:10.1002/ijop.12019

Bargh JA, Chen M, Burrows L. Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype-activation on action .  J Pers Soc Psychol . 1996;71(2):230‐244. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.71.2.230

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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• Introduction
• Sensing and perceiving
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• Synthesis of constituent elements
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perception , in humans , the process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience. That experience, or percept, is the joint product of the stimulation and of the process itself. Relations found between various types of stimulation (e.g., light waves and sound waves) and their associated percepts suggest inferences that can be made about the properties of the perceptual process; theories of perceiving then can be developed on the basis of these inferences. Because the perceptual process is not itself public or directly observable (except to the perceiver himself, whose percepts are given directly in experience), the validity of perceptual theories can be checked only indirectly. That is, predictions derived from theory are compared with appropriate empirical data, quite often through experimental research.

Historically, systematic thought about perceiving was the province of philosophy . Indeed, perceiving remains of interest to philosophers, and many issues about the process that were originally raised by philosophers are still of current concern. As a scientific enterprise, however, the investigation of perception has especially developed as part of the larger discipline of psychology .

Philosophical interest in perception stems largely from questions about the sources and validity of what is called human knowledge (see epistemology ). Epistemologists ask whether a real, physical world exists independently of human experience and, if so, how its properties can be learned and how the truth or accuracy of that experience can be determined. They also ask whether there are innate ideas or whether all experience originates through contact with the physical world, mediated by the sense organs . For the most part, psychology bypasses such questions in favour of problems that can be handled by its special methods. The remnants of such philosophical questions, however, do remain; researchers are still concerned, for example, with the relative contributions of innate and learned factors to the perceptual process.

Such fundamental philosophical assertions as the existence of a physical world, however, are taken for granted among most of those who study perception from a scientific perspective. Typically, researchers in perception simply accept the apparent physical world particularly as it is described in those branches of physics concerned with electromagnetic energy , optics, and mechanics. The problems they consider relate to the process whereby percepts are formed from the interaction of physical energy (for example, light) with the perceiving organism. Of further interest is the degree of correspondence between percepts and the physical objects to which they ordinarily relate. How accurately, for example, does the visually perceived size of an object match its physical size as measured (e.g., with a yardstick)?

Questions of the latter sort imply that perceptual experiences typically have external referents and that they are meaningfully organized, most often as objects. Meaningful objects, such as trees, faces, books, tables, and dogs, are normally seen rather than separately perceived as the dots, lines, colours, and other elements of which they are composed. In the language of Gestalt psychologists, immediate human experience is of organized wholes ( Gestalten ), not of collections of elements.

A major goal of Gestalt theory in the 20th century was to specify the brain processes that might account for the organization of perception. Gestalt theorists, chief among them the German-U.S. psychologist and philosopher, the founder of Gestalt theory, Max Wertheimer and the German-U.S. psychologists Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler , rejected the earlier assumption that perceptual organization was the product of learned relationships ( associations ), the constituent elements of which were called simple sensations . Although Gestaltists agreed that simple sensations logically could be understood to comprise organized percepts, they argued that percepts themselves were basic to experience. One does not perceive so many discrete dots (as simple sensations), for example; the percept is that of a dotted line.

Without denying that learning can play some role in perception, many theorists took the position that perceptual organization reflects innate properties of the brain itself. Indeed, perception and brain functions were held by Gestaltists to be formally identical (or isomorphic), so much so that to study perception is to study the brain. Much contemporary research in perception is directed toward inferring specific features of brain function from such behaviour as the reports ( introspections ) people give of their sensory experiences. More and more such inferences are gratifyingly being matched with physiological observations of the brain itself.

Many investigators relied heavily on introspective reports, treating them as though they were objective descriptions of public events. Serious doubts were raised in the 1920s about this use of introspection by the U.S. psychologist John B. Watson and others, who argued that it yielded only subjective accounts and that percepts are inevitably private experiences and lack the objectivity commonly required of scientific disciplines . In response to objections about subjectivism, there arose an approach known as behaviourism that restricts its data to objective descriptions or measurements of the overt behaviour of organisms other than the experimenter himself. Verbal reports are not excluded from consideration as long as they are treated strictly as public (objective) behaviour and are not interpreted as literal, reliable descriptions of the speaker’s private (subjective, introspective) experience. The behaviouristic approach does not rule out the scientific investigation of perception; instead, it modestly relegates perceptual events to the status of inferences. Percepts of others manifestly cannot be observed, though their properties can be inferred from observable behaviour (verbal and nonverbal).

One legacy of behaviourism in contemporary research on perception is a heavy reliance on very simple responses (often nonverbal), such as the pressing of a button or a lever. One advantage of this Spartan approach is that it can be applied to organisms other than man and to human infants (who also cannot give verbal reports). This restriction does not, however, cut off the researcher from the rich supply of hypotheses about perception that derive from his own introspections. Behaviourism does not proscribe sources of hypotheses; it simply specifies that only objective data are to be used in testing those hypotheses.

Behaviouristic methods for studying perception are apt to call minimally on the complex, subjective, so-called higher mental processes that seem characteristic of adult human beings; they thus tend to dehumanize perceptual theory and research. Thus, when attention is limited to objective stimuli and responses, parallels can readily be drawn between perceiving (by living organisms) and information processing (by such devices as electronic computers). Indeed, it is from this information-processing approach that some of the more intriguing theoretical contributions (e.g., abstract models of perception) are currently being made. It is expected that such practical applications as the development of artificial “eyes” for the blind may emerge from these man–machine analogies . Computer-based machines that can discriminate among visual patterns already have been constructed, such as those that “read” the code numbers on bank checks.

6.1 The Process of Perception

Learning objectives.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Discuss how salience influences the selection of perceptual information.
• Explain the ways in which we organize perceptual information.

Perception is the process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensory information. This cognitive and psychological process begins with receiving stimuli through our primary senses (vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell). This information is then passed along to corresponding areas of the brain and organized into our existing structures and patterns, and then interpreted based on previous experiences (Figure 6.1). How we perceive the people and objects around us directly affects our communication. We respond differently to an object or person that we perceive favorably than we do to something or someone we find unfavorable. But how do we filter through the mass amounts of incoming information, organize it, and make meaning from what makes it through our perceptual filters and into our social realities?

Selecting Information

We take in information through all five of our senses, but our perceptual field (the world around us) includes so many stimuli that it is impossible for our brains to process and make sense of it all. So, as information comes in through our senses, various factors influence what actually continues on through the perception process (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). Selecting is the first part of the perception process, in which we focus our attention on certain incoming sensory information (Figure 6.2). Think about how, out of many other possible stimuli to pay attention to, you may hear a familiar voice in the hallway, see a pair of shoes you want to buy from across the mall, or smell something cooking for dinner when you get home from work. We quickly cut through and push to the background all kinds of sights, smells, sounds, and other stimuli, but how do we decide what to select and what to leave out?

We tend to pay attention to information that is salient. Salience is the degree to which something attracts our attention in a particular context. The thing attracting our attention can be abstract, like a concept, or concrete, like an object. For example, a person’s identity as a Native American may become salient when they are protesting at the Columbus Day parade in Denver, Colorado. Or a bright flashlight shining in your face while camping at night is sure to be salient. The degree of salience depends on three features (Fiske & Tayor, 1991). We tend to find things salient when they are visually or aurally stimulating, they meet our needs or interests, or when they do or don’t meet our expectations.

Visual and Aural Stimulation

It is probably not surprising to learn that visually and/or aurally stimulating things become salient in our perceptual field and get our attention. Creatures ranging from fish to hummingbirds are attracted to things like silver spinners on fishing poles or red and yellow bird feeders. Having our senses stimulated isn’t always a positive thing though. Think about the couple that won’t stop talking during the movie or the upstairs neighbor whose subwoofer shakes your ceiling at night. In short, stimuli can be attention-getting in a productive or distracting way. However, we can use this knowledge to our benefit by minimizing distractions when we have something important to say. It’s probably better to have a serious conversation with a significant other in a quiet place rather than a crowded food court.

Needs and Interests

We tend to pay attention to information that we perceive to meet our needs or interests in some way. This type of selective attention can help us meet instrumental needs and get things done. When you need to speak with a financial aid officer about your scholarships and loans, you sit in the waiting room and listen for your name to be called. Paying close attention to whose name is called means you can be ready to start your meeting and hopefully get your business handled. When we don’t think certain messages meet our needs, stimuli that would normally get our attention may be completely lost. Imagine you are in the grocery store and you hear someone say your name. You turn around, only to hear that person say, “Finally! I said your name three times. I thought you forgot who I was!” A few seconds before, when you were focused on figuring out which kind of orange juice to get, you were attending to the various pulp options to the point that you tuned other stimuli out, even something as familiar as the sound of someone calling your name. We select and attend to information that meets our needs.

We also find information salient that interests us. Of course, many times, stimuli that meet our needs are also interesting, but it’s worth discussing these two items separately because sometimes we find things interesting that don’t necessarily meet our needs (Figure 6.3). I’m sure we’ve all gotten sucked into a television show, video game, or random project and paid attention to that at the expense of something that actually meets our needs like cleaning or spending time with a significant other. Paying attention to things that interest us but don’t meet specific needs seems like the basic formula for procrastination that we are all familiar with.

In many cases we know what interests us and we automatically gravitate toward stimuli that match up with that. For example, as you filter through radio stations, you likely already have an idea of what kind of music interests you and will stop on a station playing something in that genre while skipping right past stations playing something you aren’t interested in. Because of this tendency, we often have to end up being forced into or accidentally experiencing something new in order to create or discover new interests. For example, you may not realize you are interested in Asian history until you are required to take such a course and have an engaging professor who sparks that interest in you. Or you may accidentally stumble on a new area of interest when you take a class you wouldn’t otherwise because it fits into your schedule. As communicators, you can take advantage of this perceptual tendency by adapting your topic and content to the interests of your audience.

Expectations

The relationship between salience and expectations is a little more complex. Basically, we can find expected things salient and find things that are unexpected salient. While this may sound confusing, a couple examples should illustrate this point. If you are expecting a package to be delivered, you might pick up on the slightest noise of a truck engine or someone’s footsteps approaching your front door. Since we expect something to happen, we may be extra tuned in to clues that it is coming. In terms of the unexpected, if you have a shy and soft-spoken friend who you overhear raising the volume and pitch of their voice while talking to another friend, you may pick up on that and assume that something out of the ordinary is going on. For something unexpected to become salient, it has to reach a certain threshold of difference. If you walked into your regular class and there were one or two more students there than normal, you may not even notice. If you walked into your class and there was someone dressed up as a wizard, you would probably notice. So, if we expect to experience something out of the routine, like a package delivery, we will find stimuli related to that expectation salient. If we experience something that we weren’t expecting and that is significantly different from our routine experiences, then we will likely find it salient.

There is a middle area where slight deviations from routine experiences may go unnoticed because we aren’t expecting them. To go back to the earlier example, if you aren’t expecting a package, and you regularly hear vehicle engines and sidewalk foot traffic outside your house, those pretty routine sounds wouldn’t be as likely to catch your attention, even if it were slightly more or less traffic than expected. This is because our expectations are often based on previous experience and patterns we have observed and internalized, which allows our brains to go on “autopilot” sometimes and fill in things that are missing or overlook extra things. Look at the following sentence and read it aloud:

Percpetoin is bsaed on pateetrns, maening we otfen raech a cocnlsuion witouht cosnidreing ecah indviidaul elmenet.

This example illustrates a test of our expectation and an annoyance to every college student. We have all had the experience of getting a paper back with typos and spelling errors circled. This can be frustrating, especially if we actually took the time to proofread. When we first learned to read and write, we learned letter by letter. A teacher or parent would show us a card with A-P-P-L-E written on it, and we would sound it out. Over time, we learned the patterns of letters and sounds and could see combinations of letters and pronounce the word quickly. Since we know what to expect when we see a certain pattern of letters, and know what comes next in a sentence since we wrote the paper, we don’t take the time to look at each letter as we proofread. This can lead us to overlook common typos and spelling errors, even if we proofread something multiple times. Now that we know how we select stimuli, let’s turn our attention to how we organize the information we receive.

Organizing Information

Organizing is the second part of the perception process, in which we sort and categorize information that we perceive based on innate and learned cognitive patterns. Three ways we sort things into patterns are by using proximity, similarity, and difference (Coren, 1980).

In terms of proximity, we tend to think that things that are close together go together (Figure 6.4). For example, have you ever been waiting to be helped in a business and the clerk assumes that you and the person standing near you are together? The moment usually ends when you and the other person in line look at each other, then back at the clerk, and one of you explains that you are not together. Even though you may have never met that other person in your life, the clerk used a basic perceptual organizing cue to group you together because you were standing in proximity to one another.

We also group things together based on similarity. We tend to think similar-looking or similar-acting things belong together. For example, a group of friends that spend time together are all males, around the same age, of the same race, and have short hair. People might assume that they are brothers. Despite the fact that many of their features are different, the salient features are organized based on similarity and they are assumed to be related (Figure 6.5).

We also organize information that we take in based on difference. In this case, we assume that the item that looks or acts different from the rest doesn’t belong with the group (Figure 6.6). For example, if you ordered ten burgers and nine of them are wrapped in paper and the last is in a cardboard container, you may assume that the burger in the container is different in some way. Perceptual errors involving people and assumptions of difference can be especially awkward, if not offensive. Have you ever attended an event, only to be mistaken as an employee working at the event, rather than a guest at the event?

These strategies for organizing information are so common that they are built into how we teach our children basic skills and how we function in our daily lives. I’m sure we all had to look at pictures in grade school and determine which things went together and which thing didn’t belong. If you think of the literal act of organizing something, like your desk at home or work, we follow these same strategies. If you have a bunch of papers and mail on the top of your desk, you will likely sort papers into separate piles for separate classes or put bills in a separate place than personal mail. You may have one drawer for pens, pencils, and other supplies and another drawer for files. In this case you are grouping items based on similarities and differences. You may also group things based on proximity, for example, by putting financial items like your checkbook, a calculator, and your pay stubs in one area so you can update your budget efficiently. In summary, we simplify information and look for patterns to help us more efficiently communicate and get through life.

Simplification and categorizing based on patterns aren’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, without this capability we would likely not have the ability to speak, read, or engage in other complex cognitive/behavioral functions. Our brain innately categorizes and files information and experiences away for later retrieval, and different parts of the brain are responsible for different sensory experiences. In short, it is natural for things to group together in some ways. There are differences among people, and looking for patterns helps us in many practical ways. However, the judgments we place on various patterns and categories are not natural; they are learned and culturally and contextually relative. Our perceptual patterns do become unproductive and even unethical when the judgments we associate with certain patterns are based on stereotypical or prejudicial thinking.

We also organize interactions and interpersonal experiences based on our firsthand experiences. Misunderstandings and conflict may result when two people experience the same encounter differently. Punctuation refers to the structuring of information into a timeline to determine the cause (stimulus) and effect (response) of our communication interactions (Sillars, 1980). Applying this concept to interpersonal conflict can help us see how the process of perception extends beyond the individual to the interpersonal level. This concept also helps illustrate how organization and interpretation can happen together and how interpretation can influence how we organize information and vice versa.

Where does a conflict begin and end? The answer to this question depends on how the people involved in the conflict punctuate, or structure, their conflict experience. Punctuation differences can often escalate conflict, which can lead to a variety of relationship problems (Watzlawick, Bavelas, & Jackson, 1967). For example, Linda and Joe are on a project team at work and have a deadline approaching. Linda has been working on the project over the weekend in anticipation of her meeting with Joe first thing Monday morning. She has had some questions along the way and has e-mailed Joe for clarification and input, but he hasn’t responded. On Monday morning, Linda walks into the meeting room, sees Joe, and says, “I’ve been working on this project all weekend and needed your help. I e-mailed you three times! What were you doing?” Joe responds, “I had no idea you e-mailed me. I was gone all weekend on a camping trip.” In this instance, the conflict started for Linda two days ago and has just started for Joe. So, for the two of them to most effectively manage this conflict, they need to communicate so that their punctuation, or where the conflict started for each one, is clear and matches up. In this example, Linda made an impression about Joe’s level of commitment to the project based on an interpretation she made after selecting and organizing incoming information. Being aware of punctuation is an important part of perception checking, which we will discuss later. Let’s now take a closer look at how interpretation plays into the perception process.

Interpreting Information

Although selecting and organizing incoming stimuli happens very quickly, and sometimes without much conscious thought, interpretation can be a much more deliberate and conscious step in the perception process. Interpretation is the third part of the perception process, in which we assign meaning to an experience using a mental structure known as schema. A  schema  is a cognitive tool for organizing related concepts or information. Schemata are like databases of stored, related information that we use to interpret new experiences. Overtime we incorporate more and more small units of information together to develop more complex understandings of new information.

We have an overall schema about education and how to interpret experiences with teachers and classmates (Figure 6.7). This schema started developing before we even went to preschool based on things that parents, peers, and the media told us about school. For example, you learned that certain symbols and objects like an apple, a ruler, a calculator, and a notebook are associated with being a student or teacher. You learned new concepts like grades and recess, and you engaged in new practices like doing homework, studying, and taking tests. You also formed new relationships with classmates, teachers, and administrators. As you progressed through your education, your schema adapted to the changing environment. How smooth or troubling schema reevaluation and revision is varies from situation to situation and person to person. For example, some students adapt their schema relatively easily as they move from elementary, to middle, to high school, and on to college and are faced with new expectations for behavior and academic engagement. Other students don’t adapt as easily, and holding onto their old schema creates problems as they try to interpret new information through old, incompatible schema.

It’s also important to be aware of schemata because our interpretations affect our behavior. For example, if you are doing a group project for class and you perceive a group member to be shy based on your schema of how shy people communicate, you may avoid giving them presentation responsibilities in your group project because you do not think shy people make good public speakers.

As we have seen, schemata are used to interpret others’ behavior and form impressions about who they are as a person. To help this process along, we often solicit information from people to help us place them into a preexisting schema. In the United States and many other Western cultures, people’s identities are often closely tied to what they do for a living. When we introduce others, or ourselves, occupation is usually one of the first things we mention. Think about how your communication with someone might differ if he or she were introduced to you as an artist versus a doctor. We make similar interpretations based on where people are from, their age, their race, and other social and cultural factors.

In summary, we have schemata about individuals, groups, places, and things, and these schemata filter our perceptions before, during, and after interactions. As schemata are retrieved from memory, they are executed, like computer programs or apps on your smartphone, to help us interpret the world around us. Just like computer programs and apps must be regularly updated to improve their functioning, we update and adapt our schemata as we have new experiences.

• Perception is the process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting information. This process affects our communication because we respond to stimuli differently, whether they are objects or persons, based on how we perceive them.
• Given the massive amounts of stimuli taken in by our senses, we only select a portion of the incoming information to organize and interpret. We select information based on salience. We tend to find salient things that are visually or aurally stimulating and things that meet our needs and interests. Expectations also influence what information we select.
• We organize information that we select into patterns based on proximity, similarity, and difference.
• We interpret information using schemata, which allow us to assign meaning to information based on accumulated knowledge and previous experience.

Discussion Questions

• Take a moment to look around wherever you are right now. Take in the perceptual field around you. What is salient for you in this moment and why? Explain the degree of salience using the three reasons for salience discussed in this section.
• As we organize information (sensory information, objects, and people) we simplify and categorize information into patterns. Identify some cases in which this aspect of the perception process is beneficial. Identify some cases in which it could be harmful or negative.
• Think about some of the schemata you have that help you make sense of the world around you. For each of the following contexts—academic, professional, personal, and civic—identify a schema that you commonly rely on or think you will rely on. For each schema you identified note a few ways that it has already been challenged or may be challenged in the future.

Remix/Revisions featured in this section

• Small editing revisions to tailor the content to the Psychology of Human Relations course.
• Added and changed some images as well as changed formatting for photos to provide links to locations of images and CC licenses.
• Added doi links to references to comply with APA 7 th edition formatting reference manual.

Attributions

CC Licensed Content, Original Modification, adaptation, and original content.  Provided by : Stevy Scarbrough. License : CC-BY-NC-SA

CC Licensed Content Shared Previously Communication in the Real World. Authored by: University of Minnesota. Located at:   https://open.lib.umn.edu/communication/chapter/2-1-perception-process/ License: CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

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Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (1991).  Social Cognition,  2nd ed. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

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How expectation influences perception

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For decades, research has shown that our perception of the world is influenced by our expectations. These expectations, also called “prior beliefs,” help us make sense of what we are perceiving in the present, based on similar past experiences. Consider, for instance, how a shadow on a patient’s X-ray image, easily missed by a less experienced intern, jumps out at a seasoned physician. The physician’s prior experience helps her arrive at the most probable interpretation of a weak signal.

The process of combining prior knowledge with uncertain evidence is known as Bayesian integration and is believed to widely impact our perceptions, thoughts, and actions. Now, MIT neuroscientists have discovered distinctive brain signals that encode these prior beliefs. They have also found how the brain uses these signals to make judicious decisions in the face of uncertainty.

“How these beliefs come to influence brain activity and bias our perceptions was the question we wanted to answer,” says Mehrdad Jazayeri, the Robert A. Swanson Career Development Professor of Life Sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.

The researchers trained animals to perform a timing task in which they had to reproduce different time intervals. Performing this task is challenging because our sense of time is imperfect and can go too fast or too slow. However, when intervals are consistently within a fixed range, the best strategy is to bias responses toward the middle of the range. This is exactly what animals did. Moreover, recording from neurons in the frontal cortex revealed a simple mechanism for Bayesian integration: Prior experience warped the representation of time in the brain so that patterns of neural activity associated with different intervals were biased toward those that were within the expected range.

MIT postdoc Hansem Sohn, former postdoc Devika Narain, and graduate student Nicolas Meirhaeghe are the lead authors of the study, which appears in the July 15 issue of Neuron .

Ready, set, go

Statisticians have known for centuries that Bayesian integration is the optimal strategy for handling uncertain information. When we are uncertain about something, we automatically rely on our prior experiences to optimize behavior.

“If you can’t quite tell what something is, but from your prior experience you have some expectation of what it ought to be, then you will use that information to guide your judgment,” Jazayeri says. “We do this all the time.”

In this new study, Jazayeri and his team wanted to understand how the brain encodes prior beliefs, and put those beliefs to use in the control of behavior. To that end, the researchers trained animals to reproduce a time interval, using a task called “ready-set-go.” In this task, animals measure the time between two flashes of light (“ready” and “set”) and then generate a “go” signal by making a delayed response after the same amount of time has elapsed.

They trained the animals to perform this task in two contexts. In the “Short” scenario, intervals varied between 480 and 800 milliseconds, and in the “Long” context, intervals were between 800 and 1,200 milliseconds. At the beginning of the task, the animals were given the information about the context (via a visual cue), and therefore knew to expect intervals from either the shorter or longer range.

Jazayeri had previously shown that humans performing this task tend to bias their responses toward the middle of the range. Here, they found that animals do the same. For example, if animals believed the interval would be short, and were given an interval of 800 milliseconds, the interval they produced was a little shorter than 800 milliseconds. Conversely, if they believed it would be longer, and were given the same 800-millisecond interval, they produced an interval a bit longer than 800 milliseconds.  

“Trials that were identical in almost every possible way, except the animal’s belief led to different behaviors,” Jazayeri says. “That was compelling experimental evidence that the animal is relying on its own belief.”

Once they had established that the animals relied on their prior beliefs, the researchers set out to find how the brain encodes prior beliefs to guide behavior. They recorded activity from about 1,400 neurons in a region of the frontal cortex, which they have previously shown is involved in timing.

During the “ready-set” epoch, the activity profile of each neuron evolved in its own way, and about 60 percent of the neurons had different activity patterns depending on the context (Short versus Long). To make sense of these signals, the researchers analyzed the evolution of neural activity across the entire population over time, and found that prior beliefs bias behavioral responses by warping the neural representation of time toward the middle of the expected range.

“We have never seen such a concrete example of how the brain uses prior experience to modify the neural dynamics by which it generates sequences of neural activities, to correct for its own imprecision. This is the unique strength of this paper: bringing together perception, neural dynamics, and Bayesian computation into a coherent framework, supported by both theory and measurements of behavior and neural activities,” says Mate Lengyel, a professor of computational neuroscience at Cambridge University, who was not involved in the study.

Embedded knowledge

Researchers believe that prior experiences change the strength of connections between neurons. The strength of these connections, also known as synapses, determines how neurons act upon one another and constrains the patterns of activity that a network of interconnected neurons can generate. The finding that prior experiences warp the patterns of neural activity provides a window onto how experience alters synaptic connections. “The brain seems to embed prior experiences into synaptic connections so that patterns of brain activity are appropriately biased,” Jazayeri says.

As an independent test of these ideas, the researchers developed a computer model consisting of a network of neurons that could perform the same ready-set-go task. Using techniques borrowed from machine learning, they were able to modify the synaptic connections and create a model that behaved like the animals.

These models are extremely valuable as they provide a substrate for the detailed analysis of the underlying mechanisms, a procedure that is known as "reverse-engineering.” Remarkably, reverse-engineering the model revealed that it solved the task the same way the monkeys’ brain did. The model also had a warped representation of time according to prior experience.  

The researchers used the computer model to further dissect the underlying mechanisms using perturbation experiments that are currently impossible to do in the brain. Using this approach, they were able to show that unwarping the neural representations removes the bias in the behavior. This important finding validated the critical role of warping in Bayesian integration of prior knowledge.

The researchers now plan to study how the brain builds up and slowly fine-tunes the synaptic connections that encode prior beliefs as an animal is learning to perform the timing task.

The research was funded by the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, the Netherlands Scientific Organization, the Marie Sklodowska Curie Reintegration Grant, the National Institutes of Health, the Sloan Foundation, the Klingenstein Foundation, the Simons Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and the McGovern Institute.

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6.3 Individual and Cultural Differences in Person Perception

Learning objectives.

• Outline the characteristics of perceivers and of cultures that influence their causal attributions.
• Explain the ways that our attributions can influence our mental health and the ways that our mental health affects our attributions.

To this point, we have focused on how the appearance, behaviors, and traits of the people we encounter influence our understanding of them. It makes sense that this would be our focus because of the emphasis within social psychology on the social situation—in this case, the people we are judging. But the person is also important, so let’s consider some of the person variables that influence how we judge other people.

Perceiver Characteristics

So far, we have assumed that different perceivers will all form pretty much the same impression of the same person. For instance, if you and I are both thinking about our friend Janetta, or describing her to someone else, we should each think about or describe her in pretty much the same way—after all, Janetta is Janetta, and she should have a personality that you and I can both see. But this is not always the case—you and I may form different impressions of Janetta, and for a variety of reasons. For one, my experiences with Janetta are somewhat different than yours. I see her in different places and talk to her about different things than you do, and thus I will have a different sample of behavior on which to base my impressions.

But you and I might even form different impressions of Janetta if we see her performing exactly the same behavior. To every experience, each of us brings our own schemas, attitudes, and expectations. In fact, the process of interpretation guarantees that we will not all form exactly the same impression of the people that we see. This, of course, reflects a basic principle that we have discussed throughout this book—our prior experiences color our current perceptions.

One perceiver factor that influences how we perceive others is the current cognitive accessibility of a given person characteristic—that is, the extent to which a person characteristic quickly and easily comes to mind for the perceiver. Differences in accessibility will lead different people to attend to different aspects of the other person. Some people first notice how attractive someone is because they care a lot about physical appearance—for them, appearance is a highly accessible characteristic. Others pay more attention to a person’s race or religion, and still others attend to a person’s height or weight. If you are interested in style and fashion, you would probably first notice a person’s clothes, whereas another person might be more likely to notice one’s athletic skills.

You can see that these differences in accessibility will influence the kinds of impressions that we form about others because they influence what we focus on and how we think about them. In fact, when people are asked to describe others, there is often more overlap in the descriptions provided by the same perceiver about different people than there is in those provided by different perceivers about the same target person (Dornbusch, Hastorf, Richardson, Muzzy, & Vreeland, 1965; Park, 1986). If you care a lot about fashion, you will describe all your friends on that dimension, whereas if I care about athletic skills, I will tend to describe all my friends on the basis of their athletic qualities. These differences reflect the differing emphasis that we as observers place on the characteristics of others rather than the real differences between those people.

People also differ in terms of how carefully they process information about others. Some people have a strong need to think about and understand others. I’m sure you know people like this—they want to know why something went wrong or right, or just to know more about anyone with whom they interact. Need for cognition refers to the tendency to think carefully and fully about social situations (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982). People with a strong need for cognition tend to process information more thoughtfully and therefore may make more causal attributions overall. In contrast, people without a strong need for cognition tend to be more impulsive and impatient and may make attributions more quickly and spontaneously (Sargent, 2004). Although the need for cognition refers to a tendency to think carefully and fully about any topic, there are also individual differences in the tendency to be interested in people more specifically. For instance, Fletcher, Danilovics, Fernandez, Peterson, and Reeder (1986) found that psychology majors were more curious about people than were natural science majors.

Individual differences exist not only in the depth of our attributions but also in the types of attributions we tend to make about both ourselves and others (Plaks, Levy, & Dweck, 2009). Some people tend to believe that people’s traits are fundamentally stable and incapable of change . We call these people entity theorists . Entity theorists tend to focus on the traits of other people and tend to make a lot of personal attributions. On the other hand, incremental theorists are those who believe that personalities change a lot over time and who therefore are more likely to make situational attributions for events . Incremental theorists are more focused on the dynamic psychological processes that arise from individuals’ changing mental states in different situations.

In one relevant study, Molden, Plaks, and Dweck (2006) found that when forced to make judgments quickly, people who had been classified as entity theorists were nevertheless still able to make personal attributions about others but were not able to easily encode the situational causes of a behavior. On the other hand, when forced to make judgments quickly, the people who were classified as incremental theorists were better able to make use of the situational aspects of the scene than the personalities of the actors.

Individual differences in attributional styles can also influence our own behavior. Entity theorists are more likely to have difficulty when they move on to new tasks because they don’t think that they will be able to adapt to the new challenges. Incremental theorists, on the other hand, are more optimistic and do better in such challenging environments because they believe that their personality can adapt to the new situation. You can see that these differences in how people make attributions can help us understand both how we think about ourselves and others and how we respond to our own social contexts (Malle, Knobe, O’Laughlin, Pearce, & Nelson, 2000).

Research Focus

How Our Attributions Can Influence Our School Performance

Carol Dweck and her colleagues (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007) tested whether the type of attributions students make about their own characteristics might influence their school performance. They assessed the attributional tendencies and the math performance of 373 junior high school students at a public school in New York City. When they first entered seventh grade, the students all completed a measure of attributional styles. Those who tended to agree with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence, and you really can’t do much to change it” were classified as entity theorists , whereas those who agreed more with statements such as “You can always greatly change how intelligent you are” were classified as incremental theorists . Then the researchers measured the students’ math grades at the end of the fall and spring terms in seventh and eighth grades.

As you can see in int the following figure, the researchers found that the students who were classified as incremental theorists improved their math scores significantly more than did the entity students. It seems that the incremental theorists really believed that they could improve their skills and were then actually able to do it. These findings confirm that how we think about traits can have a substantial impact on our own behavior.

Students who believed that their intelligence was more malleable (incremental styles) were more likely to improve their math skills than were students who believed that intelligence was difficult to change (entity styles). Data are from Blackwell et al. (2007).

Cultural Differences in Person Perception

As we have seen in many places in this book, the culture that we live in has a significant impact on the way we think about and perceive the world. And thus it is not surprising that people in different cultures would tend to think about people at least somewhat differently. One difference is between people from Western cultures (e.g., the United States, Canada, and Australia) and people from East Asian cultures (e.g., Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, and India). People from Western cultures tend to be primarily oriented toward individualism, tending to think about themselves as different from (and often better than) the other people in their environment and believing that other people make their own decisions and are responsible for their own actions. In contrast, people in many East Asian cultures take a more collectivistic view of people that emphasizes not so much the individual but rather the relationship between individuals and the other people and things that surround them. The outcome of these differences is that on average, people from individualistic cultures tend to focus more on the individual person, whereas, again on average, people from collectivistic cultures tend to focus more on the situation (Ji, Peng, & Nisbett, 2000; Lewis, Goto, & Kong, 2008; Maddux & Yuki, 2006).

In one study demonstrating this difference, Miller (1984) asked children and adults in both India (a collectivist culture) and the United States (an individualist culture) to indicate the causes of negative actions by other people. Although the youngest children (ages 8 and 11) did not differ, the older children (age 15) and the adults did—Americans made more personal attributions, whereas Indians made more situational attributions for the same behavior.

Masuda and Nisbett (2001) asked American and Japanese students to describe what they saw in images like the one shown in Figure 6.7 “Cultural Differences in Perception” . They found that while both groups talked about the most salient objects (the fish, which were brightly colored and swimming around), the Japanese students also tended to talk and remember more about the images in the background—they remembered the frog and the plants as well as the fish.

Figure 6.7 Cultural Differences in Perception

Michael Morris and his colleagues (Hong, Morris, Chiu, & Benet-Martínez, 2000) investigated the role of culture on person perception in a different way, by focusing on people who are bicultural (i.e., who have knowledge about two different cultures). In their research, they used high school students living in Hong Kong. Although traditional Chinese values are emphasized in Hong Kong, because Hong Kong was a British-administrated territory for more than a century, the students there are also acculturated with Western social beliefs and values.

Morris and his colleagues first randomly assigned the students to one of three priming conditions. Participants in the American culture priming condition saw pictures of American icons (such as the U.S. Capitol building and the American flag) and then wrote 10 sentences about American culture. Participants in the Chinese culture priming condition saw eight Chinese icons (such as a Chinese dragon and the Great Wall of China) and then wrote 10 sentences about Chinese culture. Finally, participants in the control condition saw pictures of natural landscapes and wrote 10 sentences about the landscapes.

Then participants in all conditions read a story about an overweight boy who was advised by a physician not to eat food with high sugar content. One day, he and his friends went to a buffet dinner where a delicious-looking cake was offered. Despite its high sugar content, he ate it. After reading the story, the participants were asked to indicate the extent to which the boy’s weight problem was caused by his personality (personal attribution) or by the situation (situational attribution). The students who had been primed with symbols about American culture gave relatively less weight to situational (rather than personal) factors in comparison with students who had been primed with symbols of Chinese culture.

In still another test of cultural differences in person perception, Kim and Markus (1999) analyzed the statements made by athletes and by the news media regarding the winners of medals in the 2000 and 2002 Olympic Games. They found that athletes in China described themselves more in terms of the situation (they talked about the importance of their coaches, their managers, and the spectators in helping them to do well), whereas American athletes (can you guess?) focused on themselves, emphasizing their own strength, determination, and focus.

Taken together then, we can see that cultural and individual differences play a similar role in person perception as they do in other social psychological areas. Although most people tend to use the same basic person-perception processes, and although we can understand these processes by observing the communalities among people, the outcomes of person perception will also be determined—at least in part—by the characteristics of the person himself or herself. And these differences are often created by the culture in which the person lives.

Attributional Styles and Mental Health

As we have seen in this chapter, how we make attributions about other people has a big influence on our reactions to them. But we also make attributions for our own behaviors. Social psychologists have discovered that there are important individual differences in the attributions that people make to the negative events that they experience and that these attributions can have a big influence on how they respond to them. The same negative event can create anxiety and depression in one individual but have virtually no effect on someone else. And still another person may see the negative event as a challenge to try even harder to overcome the difficulty (Blascovich & Mendes, 2000).

A major determinant of how we react to perceived threats is the attributions that we make to them. Attributional style refers to the type of attributions that we tend to make for the events that occur to us . These attributions can be to our own characteristics ( internal ) or to the situation ( external ), but attributions can also be made on other dimensions, including stable versus unstable , and global versus specific . Stable attributions are those that we think will be relatively permanent, whereas unstable attributions are expected to change over time. Global attributions are those that we feel apply broadly, whereas specific attributions are those causes that we see as more unique to specific events.

You may know some people who tend to make negative or pessimistic attributions to negative events that they experience—we say that these people have a negative attributional style . These people explain negative events by referring to their own internal, stable, and global qualities. People with negative attributional styles say things such as the following:

• “I failed because I am no good” ( an internal attribution ).
• “I always fail” ( a stable attribution ).
• “I fail in everything” ( a global attribution ).

You might well imagine that the result of these negative attributional styles is a sense of hopelessness and despair (Metalsky, Joiner, Hardin, & Abramson, 1993). Indeed, Alloy, Abramson, and Francis (1999) found that college students who indicated that they had negative attributional styles when they first came to college were more likely than those who had a more positive style to experience an episode of depression within the next few months.

People who have extremely negative attributional styles, in which they continually make external, stable, and global attributions for their behavior , are said to be experiencing learned helplessness (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Seligman, 1975). Learned helplessness was first demonstrated in research that found that some dogs that were strapped into a harness and exposed to painful electric shocks became passive and gave up trying to escape from the shock, even in new situations in which the harness had been removed and escape was therefore possible. Similarly, some people who were exposed to bursts of noise later failed to stop the noise when they were actually able to do so. In short, learned helplessness is the tendency to make external, rather than internal, attributions for our behaviors. Those who experience learned helplessness do not feel that they have any control over their own outcomes and are more likely to have a variety of negative health outcomes (Henry, 2005; Peterson & Seligman, 1984).

Another type of attributional technique that people sometimes use to help them feel better about themselves is known as self-handicapping. Self-handicapping occurs when we make statements or engage in behaviors that help us create a convenient external attribution for potential failure . For instance, in research by Berglas and Jones (1978), participants first performed an intelligence test on which they did very well. It was then explained to them that the researchers were testing the effects of different drugs on performance and that they would be asked to take a similar but potentially more difficult intelligence test while they were under the influence of one of two different drugs.

The participants were then given a choice—they could take a pill that was supposed to facilitate performance on the intelligence task (making it easier for them to perform) or a pill that was supposed to inhibit performance on the intelligence task, thereby making the task harder to perform (no drugs were actually administered). Berglas found that men—but not women—engaged in self-handicapping: They preferred to take the performance-inhibiting rather than the performance-enhancing drug, choosing the drug that provided a convenient external attribution for potential failure.

Although women may also self-handicap, particularly by indicating that they are unable to perform well due to stress or time constraints (Hirt, Deppe, & Gordon, 1991), men seem to do it more frequently. This is consistent with the general gender differences we have talked about in many places in this book—on average, men are more concerned about maintaining their self-esteem and social status in the eyes of themselves and others than are women.

You can see that there are some benefits (but also, of course, some costs) of self-handicapping. If we fail after we self-handicap, we simply blame the failure on the external factor. But if we succeed despite the handicap that we have created for ourselves, we can make clear internal attributions for our success. But engaging in behaviors that create self-handicapping can be costly because they make it harder for us to succeed. In fact, research has found that people who report that they self-handicap regularly show lower life satisfaction, less competence, poorer moods, less interest in their jobs, and even more substance abuse (Zuckerman & Tsai, 2005). Although self-handicapping would seem to be useful for insulating our feelings from failure, it is not a good tack to take in the long run.

Fortunately, not all people have such negative attributional styles. In fact, most people tend to have more positive ones—styles that are related to high positive self-esteem and a tendency to explain the negative events they experience by referring to external, unstable, and specific qualities. Thus people with positive attributional styles are likely to say things such as the following:

• “I failed because the task is very difficult” ( an external attribution ).
• “I will do better next time” ( an unstable attribution ).
• “I failed in this domain, but I’m good in other things” ( a specific attribution ).

In sum, we can say that people who make more positive attributions toward the negative events that they experience will persist longer at tasks and that this persistence can help them. But there are limits to the effectiveness of these strategies. We cannot control everything, and trying to do so can be stressful. We can change some things but not others; thus sometimes the important thing is to know when it’s better to give up, stop worrying, and just let things happen. Having a positive outlook is healthy, but we cannot be unrealistic about what we can and cannot do. Unrealistic optimism is the tendency to be overly positive about the likelihood that negative things will occur to us and that we will be able to effectively cope with them if they do . When we are too optimistic, we may set ourselves up for failure and depression when things do not work out as we had hoped (Weinstein & Klein, 1996). We may think that we are immune to the potential negative outcomes of driving while intoxicated or practicing unsafe sex, but these optimistic beliefs are not healthy. Fortunately, most people have a reasonable balance between optimism and realism (Taylor & Armor, 1996). They tend to set goals that they believe they can attain, and they regularly make some progress toward reaching them. Research has found that setting reasonable goals and feeling that we are moving toward them makes us happy, even if we may not in fact attain the goals themselves (Lawrence, Carver, & Scheier, 2002).

Key Takeaways

• Because we each use our own expectations in judgment, people may form different impressions of the same person performing the same behavior.
• Individual differences in the cognitive accessibility of a given personal characteristic may lead to more overlap in the descriptions provided by the same perceiver about different people than there is in those provided by different perceivers about the same target person.
• People with a strong need for cognition make more causal attributions overall. Entity theorists tend to focus on the traits of other people and tend to make a lot of personal attributions, whereas incremental theorists tend to believe that personalities change a lot over time and therefore are more likely to make situational attributions for events.
• People from Western cultures tend to make more personal attributions, whereas people from collectivistic cultures tend to focus more on the situational explanations of behavior.
• Individual differences in attributional styles can influence how we respond to the negative events that we experience.
• People who have extremely negative attributional styles, in which they continually make external, stable, and global attributions for their behavior, are said to be experiencing learned helplessness
• Self-handicapping is an attributional technique that prevents us from making ability attributions for our own failures.
• Having a positive outlook is healthy, but it must be tempered. We cannot be unrealistic about what we can and cannot do.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Can you think of a time when your own expectations influenced your attributions about another person?
• Which constructs are more cognitively accessible for you? Do these constructs influence how you judge other people?
• Consider a time when you or someone you knew engaged in self-handicapping. What was the outcome of doing so?
• Do you think that you have a more positive or a more negative attributional style? How do you think this style influences your judgments about your own successes and failures?

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Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36 (4), 405–417.

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Dornbusch, S. M., Hastorf, A. H., Richardson, S. A., Muzzy, R. E., & Vreeland, R. S. (1965). The perceiver and the perceived: Their relative influence on the categories of interpersonal cognition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1 (5), 434–440.

Fletcher, G. J. O., Danilovics, P., Fernandez, G., Peterson, D., & Reeder, G. D. (1986). Attributional complexity: An individual differences measure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51 (4), 875–884.

Henry, P. C. (2005). Life stress, explanatory style, hopelessness, and occupational stress. International Journal of Stress Management, 12, 241–256.

Hirt, E. R., Deppe, R. K., & Gordon, L. J. (1991). Self-reported versus behavioral self-handicapping: Empirical evidence for a theoretical distinction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61 (6), 981–991.

Hong, Y.-Y., Morris, M. W., Chiu, C.-Y., & Benet-Martínez, V. (2000). Multicultural minds: A dynamic constructivist approach to culture and cognition. American Psychologist, 55 (7), 709–720.

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Essay on Perception In Life

Students are often asked to write an essay on Perception In Life in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Perception In Life

Understanding perception.

Perception is the way we see and understand things around us. It’s like wearing glasses that can change how the world looks to us. Everyone has their own set of glasses, so what one person sees might be different from what another sees. This is why two people can look at the same thing but have different ideas about it.

Perception Shapes Thoughts

Our thoughts are often based on our perceptions. If we see a dark cloud, we might think it will rain. This shows that what we see can influence what we think or expect. Our mind uses what we see to make guesses about what will happen next.

Perception Influences Actions

What we do is also affected by how we see things. For example, if we see a dog and think it is friendly, we might want to pet it. But if we see it as scary, we would probably stay away. So, our actions can change based on our perception.

Changing Perceptions

Sometimes, we can change how we see things. If we learn more about something or hear what others think, our view can change. This is important because it helps us understand others better and learn new things.

250 Words Essay on Perception In Life

What is perception, why perception matters.

Our perception is important because it affects what we think and how we feel. If you see a glass with water up to the middle, you might think it’s half full or half empty. Your answer can show if you see things in a hopeful way or maybe a less hopeful way. This can influence your mood and how you deal with problems.

Perception Shapes Our World

The way we see things can shape our world. For example, if you believe you’re good at drawing, you’ll feel happy when you have a pencil and paper. But if you think you’re bad at it, you might feel sad or not want to draw at all. Our beliefs can encourage us to try new things or stop us from trying.

Perception Can Change

The good news is that our perception can change. If you learn more about something or see it from a different angle, you might start to see it in a new light. It’s like getting a new lens for your mind’s camera. With a new lens, you can take better pictures and understand the world in a better way.

In conclusion, perception is a powerful part of life. It’s the set of glasses we wear to look at the world. By knowing this, we can try to see things in a brighter, kinder way and make our lives and the lives of others better.

500 Words Essay on Perception In Life

Perception is the way we see and understand things around us. It is like having a set of glasses through which we look at the world. These glasses can change the way everything looks to us. For example, if you wear pink glasses, everything seems pink. In life, our experiences, feelings, and thoughts are like these glasses, they shape how we see our surroundings.

Perception and Communication

When we talk to others, our perception plays a big role. If you believe someone is kind, you might listen to them more carefully. On the other hand, if you think someone is not nice, you might not listen to them at all. This can lead to misunderstandings. It’s like if you’re playing a game of telephone; what you hear can be very different from what the first person said.

Perception and Learning

In school, perception is a big deal. If you see math as fun, you might do better at it because you enjoy practicing. But if you see math as hard, you might not want to try. Teachers try to make subjects interesting so students can have a positive view of learning. This can make school more fun and help students do better.

Changing Our Perception

Perception and happiness.

Finally, how we see things can affect our happiness. If we focus on the good in our lives, we tend to feel happier. It’s like when you find a $5 bill on the ground, you feel lucky and happy. But if you only think about the $5 you lost last week, you might feel sad. By looking for the good, we can feel better about our lives.

In conclusion, perception is like a pair of glasses that colors everything in our lives. It shapes how we see people, how we learn, and even how happy we are. By understanding that we can change our perception, we can improve our communication, learn better, and find more joy in life. It’s important to remember that our view is not the only one and that being open to new ideas can make our world a brighter place.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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Dress is a Fundamental Component of Person Perception

Neil hester.

1 University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Eric Hehman

2 McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Academic Abstract

Clothing, hairstyle, makeup, and accessories influence first impressions. However, target dress is notably absent from current theories and models of person perception. We discuss three reasons for this minimal attention to dress in person perception: high theoretical complexity, incompatibility with traditional methodology, and underappreciation by the groups who have historically guided research in person perception. We propose a working model of person perception that incorporates target dress alongside target face, target body, context, and perceiver characteristics. Then, we identify four types of inferences for which perceivers rely on target dress: social categories, cognitive states, status, and aesthetics. For each of these, we review relevant work in social cognition, integrate this work with existing dress research, and propose future directions. Finally, we identify and offer solutions to the theoretical and methodological challenges accompanying the psychological study of dress.

Public Abstract

Why is it that people often agonize over what to wear for a job interview, a first date, or a party? The answer is simple: They understand that others’ first impressions of them rely on their clothing, hairstyle, makeup, and accessories. Many people might be surprised, then, to learn that psychologists’ theories about how people form first impressions of others have little to say about how people dress. This is true in part because the meaning of clothing is so complex and culturally dependent. We propose a working model of first impressions that identifies four types of information that people infer from dress: people’s social identities, mental states, status, and aesthetic tastes. For each of these, we review existing research on clothing, integrate this research with related work from social psychology more broadly, and propose future directions for research.

In one of Cinderella’s most iconic scenes, the Fairy Godmother transforms Cinderella’s clothing from rags into a beautiful ballgown. She is now fit for the royal ball: Those in attendance greet her with awe rather than the disdain she would have faced arriving in her old, threadbare clothes. At its core, this scene is about the transformative power of dress. One outfit changes others’ impressions of Cinderella, and she lives happily ever after. Though most would agree that dress substantially influences perceptions and outcomes, this topic has received relatively little attention in social psychology. This oversight raises questions regarding the validity of person perception models that do not incorporate target dress. Here, we review existing literature, propose a working model to integrate dress with the broader impression formation literature, and identify four important ways in which dress impacts person perception.

Despite lay consensus that dress is important for first impressions, recent reviews of social categorization and evaluation processes ( Bacev-Giles, & Haji, 2017 ; Kang & Bodenhausen, 2015 ; Pauker et al., 2018 ; Rule & Sutherland, 2017 ) have little to say about the impact of dress on these processes. This lack of attention contrasts sharply with heavily-researched factors involved in person perception, such as facial appearance. The role of faces in person perception has been studied for decades ( Bruce & Young, 1986 ; Ekman & Friesen, 1971 ; Rhodes, 2006 ; Secord & Bevan, 1956 ; Todorov et al., 2015 ), with many of the most prominent theories and models of person perception ( Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008 ; Vernon et al., 2014 ; Zebrowitz et al., 2003 ) founded on the study of faces—almost always disembodied faces absent body or clothing for purposes of experimental control. However, people in the wild regularly perceive faces in a fully embodied state—that is, with an entire outfit and body unavoidably integrated into the categorization and evaluation process. If psychologists’ goal is to form theories of person perception that explain and predict real-world judgments, then it is important to begin studying impressions of more realistic and complex stimuli.

Of course, overall impressions emerge from dress alongside numerous other factors such as emotion expression, dynamic movement, body, surrounding context, and perceivers’ beliefs and motivations. The present work focuses on the importance of dress in person perception both beyond and in conjunction with these other important factors. The importance of dress has not been altogether ignored by researchers, as there is a considerable array of research on clothing across multiple fields: psychology, sociology, anthropology, marketing, and others. However, researchers have often studied dress piecemeal and for idiosyncratic purposes, focusing on specific phenomena (e.g., associations of red with attractiveness; signals of wealth or sexual interest; see K. Johnson et al., 2014 ). One review, which aimed to “present a comprehensive review and analysis of published research that investigated relationships between the dress of an individual and how that dress affected others’ behavior toward the individual” ( K. Johnson et al., 2008 , p. 3) ends its abstract with the statement “Most of this research was not guided by theory” (p. 3). For this reason, most existing research on the psychology of dress is difficult to situate and understand within broader theoretical frameworks in person perception and social cognition.

Here, we argue that dress is an essential and underappreciated element of person perception that should be incorporated in theoretical models. We first provide a formal definition of the term “dress.” Then, we reflect on three possible reasons for the historical neglect of dress in social psychology: high complexity, incompatibility with dominant methods, and cultural association with oppressed groups. Finally, we propose a working model of person perception in which perceivers make sense of the targets’ dress, body, face, and other features through their socioperceptual “lens” (i.e., their cultural knowledge, stereotypes, and beliefs) to form and update impressions. Within the target dress part of this model of person perception, we outline four factors or signals that observers may glean from the dress of targets: social categories, cognitive states, status, and aesthetics. This list is non-exhaustive: We present this model as a tool for organizing the existing literature on dress and person perception and identifying future directions for research.

Defining Dress

Like many categories (e.g., bird, soup), the concept of “dress” is fuzzy. People generally have an intuitive sense of what dress is, yet drawing a hard line around what is and is not dress is difficult. Typical articles of clothing—shirts and pants, socks and shoes, overcoats and undergarments—are clearly elements of dress. Biological physical characteristics of the face and body such as height, weight, muscularity, and face shape are clearly not elements of dress. Objects in the environment such as beds, rugs, and paintings are similarly not elements of dress. In these cases, what is and is not dress is uncontroversial. However, what should we make of hair and hairstyles, makeup and tattoos? If a wheelchair or prosthetic is needed for movement, is it an element of dress? What about backpacks, purses, and bags?

A formal definition of dress helps to resolve these ambiguities. Here, we draw on foundational work of Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne Eicher (1965 , 1973 , 1992 ):

Dress of an individual is an assemblage of modifications of the body and/or supplements to the body. ( Roach-Higgins & Eicher, 1992 , p. 1)

Roach-Higgins and Eicher, (1992) describe this definition as “unambiguous, free of personal or social valuing or bias, usable in descriptions across national and cultural boundaries, and inclusive of all phenomena that can be accurately designated as dress” (p. 1). They also note that this definition does impose “a somewhat arbitrary conceptual separation between biologically determined body characteristics and dress” (p. 1), acknowledging the conceptual fuzziness between body and dress. A detailed account of the term “dress” versus related terms (e.g., clothing, appearance, adornment) can be found in Roach-Higgins and Eicher (1992) .

As we are primarily concerned with dress in the context of person perception, it is useful to note that target dress , as understood through the eyes of a perceiver, is not fully inclusive of dress as it is experienced by the target individual. There are modifications and supplements of the body that are invisible to some perceivers because they are underneath clothing (e.g., tattoos), appear to occur naturally (e.g., plastic surgery), or are otherwise imperceptible (e.g., some perceivers have color blindness).

With this definition in mind, we can reflect on the aforementioned cases. Hair itself is not dress; however, styling one’s hair is, as doing so modifies the body. Makeup and tattoos are dress, despite not being as explicitly “material” as clothing. Physical aids such as wheelchairs and prosthetics present a trickier case; although they do modify the body, they do so in a way that is meant to restore and extend functioning, similar to a tool, making their status as elements of “dress” unclear, though specific colors or styles of physical aids may more clearly be seen as dress. Backpacks and purses are typically chosen to supplement the body’s carrying capacity and also modify the body’s appearance; grocery bags, though similar, perhaps are not experienced or perceived as “extensions” of the body in the same way.

This definition of dress is by no means perfect, and readers may disagree with our descriptions of these fringe cases or highlight cases that seem odd to label as “dress” (e.g., the visual results of dental surgery, or scars from an accident). However, this exercise draws some useful boundaries around “dress” as a key concept in person perception. In the next section, we highlight the dearth of theory describing the role of dress in person perception.

The Neglect of Dress in Person Perception

At a glance, dress seems to strongly influence impressions of others, guiding perceivers’ inferences about targets’ personalities, interests, and status. What, then, might explain the lack of research and theory on dress in the person perception literature? We discuss three potential reasons: high complexity, incompatibility with traditional methodology, and cultural associations with oppressed groups.

High Complexity, Emergent Properties

Assembling a “good” outfit is an undeniably pressing task for some people (including one author of the present work) because it requires combining several discrete items of clothing into a single, harmonious whole—a Gestalt of style. Outfits present a similarly vexing issue for psychologists who wish to form theory or inferences about dress. The impact of a given item of clothing on perceptions of any individual cannot be understood in a vacuum: the same pair of jeans could elicit wildly different impressions depending on what it’s worn with, who’s wearing it (their face and body type), where they’re wearing it, and when (the season, the century)—not to mention the idiosyncrasies of the perceivers themselves. Furthermore, the range of variability in facial features (e.g., eye size, face length) and body features (e.g., arm length, waist-to-hip ratio) are restricted by biology and thus fairly similar across cultures, whereas dress has no such biological restriction of range.

Furthermore, because the psychological meaning of dress is socially and culturally constructed, perhaps to an even greater degree than many other psychological factors (given its proximity to art and aesthetics; Miller, 2007 ), research on dress is less compatible with the goal of uncovering “psychological universals”—a goal that is often assigned high theoretical value. For example, in research on person perception, evolutionary theories have had an outsized impact in part because evolutionary perspectives align with the idea of psychological universals. Research on perceived attractiveness relies on the idea that sexual selection prioritizes sexually dimorphic traits ( Perrett et al., 1998 ; Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999 ), and the valence-dominance model of face perception identified Dominance and Trustworthiness/Valence because of the evolutionary functions served by inferring these traits from faces ( Oosterhof & Todorov, 2008 ; Vernon et al., 2014 ). These parsimonious and universalist accounts have since undergone revisions: sexual dimorphism does a poor job accounting for gendered face perception ( Hester, Jones, & Hehman, 2021 ), and the dimensions that describe face perception vary across cultures and social groups ( Jones et al., 2021 ; Xie et al., 2021 ).

These revisions reflect an ongoing value shift in social psychology, which as a field increasingly embraces complexity, incorporates cultural variability, and tests the generalizability of well-established models. However, this shift also poses practical challenges for designing studies and analyzing data. Many of the traditional methods in social psychology are ill-suited for handling highly complex phenomena, which is another possible contributor to the minimal study of dress in person perception.

Incompatibility With Traditional Methodology

Experimentation is the main approach used by social psychologists for causal inference. Some researchers have argued that this heavy focus on experimentation can be attributed to modeling psychology after more mature sciences such as biology and chemistry ( Oishi et al., 2009 ; Rozin, 2001 ). In this argument, the 2 × 2 experiment—simple enough to calculate statistics for by hand, complex enough to reveal exciting contextual factors—became the gold standard, which led Moin Syed (2021) to quip that social psychology is “2 × 2 designs all the way down.” However, this methodology constrains the universe of questions that can be asked, such that researchers may have been encouraged to test hypotheses that were more amenable to being answered by 2 × 2 experimental designs.

Due to its high complexity, dress is not amenable to being researched in 2 × 2 experimental designs. Studies in this traditional framework would either lack generalizability (studying only a narrow array of dress options) or quickly sprawl out of control (e.g., a 10 × 5 × 8 design). Furthermore, the creation of tightly controlled stimuli would have posed a nigh insurmountable methodological challenge. Any given article of clothing varies in color, fit, fabric, and pattern; and, it influences impressions in tandem with other articles of clothing, the body of the wearer, and various other factors. Although researchers now embrace and model heterogeneity in stimuli to a greater extent, historically this has not been the case ( Judd et al., 2012 ; Westfall et al., 2015 ).

This greater embrace of heterogeneity aligns with a broader emphasis on external validity, which requires testing psychological phenomena across a more representative population of participants, targets, and contexts. This brings us to one more potential reason why dress may have been neglected in the study of person perception: The people who best understand dress as part of their lived experience have not, historically, been those conducting and guiding research on impressions.

Dress as Expression and Communication for Oppressed Groups

In the past couple of decades, social psychology has reckoned with a “crisis of generalizability.” The field’s overreliance on samples from WEIRD populations became readily apparent ( Henrich et al., 2010 ), and intersectionality scholars highlighted the absence of myriad multidimensional groups from most psychological work ( Cole, 2009 ; Goff & Kahn, 2013 ; McCormick-Huhn et al., 2019 ; Settles et al., 2020 ). Many of the majority-group researchers who have made universal claims likely view the world through their majority-group lenses, leading them to misperceive the importance of various phenomena to human experience as a whole.

To be sure, individuals across the entire spectrum of status care about dress. Red carpet events and high fashion brands highlight the sartorial tastes of wealthy and powerful individuals. However, those with power have the resources to express themselves in a wide variety of ways, whereas those lacking power have fewer means of expression. Dress is perhaps one of the primary vectors through which individuals lower in power and status can express themselves. Don Letts, a prominent DJ and filmmaker, echoed this sentiment: “You’ve got to understand. Black, working-class kid, that’s the only way we had to express ourselves was through the music we listened to and the clothes we wore” ( Trufelman, 2018 , pp. 3:05–3:15).

Thus, the importance of dress as a factor in person perception might be most immediately understood by members of groups that have been historically excluded from the powerful, piloting positions of the field—people who cannot afford to wear certain kinds of clothes (e.g., poor people), who face strict cultural expectations about appropriate clothing (e.g., women), and who sometimes feel pressure to wear clothes that do not match their felt identity (e.g., LBGTQ+ [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, plus (others)] people). In her podcast series on dress and history, Avery Trufelman addresses the myth of fashion as frivolity:

There is this myth, that it’s frivolous or unproductive to care about how you look. Clothing and fashion get trivialized a lot. But think about who, culturally, gets associated with clothing and fashion: young people, women, queers, and people of color. Groups of people who, historically, haven’t been listened to, have expressed themselves on their bodies, through their style, their hair, their tattoos, their piercings, and what they wear. ( Trufelman, 2018 , pp. 2:40–3:05)

In addition to being a form of self-expression, dress is also a vital identity-signaling tool for oppressed groups. For example, across history, members of the LGBTQ+ community have used dress to subtly but clearly state their sexual orientation and gender identity to other members of the community, allowing relationships and networks to form without being “out” to the general public ( Clarke, 2013 ).

In this way, it seems probable that the historical dominance of social psychology by researchers who are mostly White ( S. O. Roberts et al., 2020 ), male ( Gruber et al., 2021 ), and from educated and wealthy backgrounds ( Morgan et al., 2021 ) contributes to the dearth of research on the psychology of dress. Critical scholarly work on fashion has better incorporated ideas from intersectionality theory and LBGTQ+ discourse (e.g., see Pritchard, 2017 for an introduction to a full journal issue on “sartorial politics, intersectionality, and queer worldmaking”), and psychologists might look to this work for new ideas and theoretical guidance. In the next section, we will see that existing work on the psychology of dress—construed broadly and drawing from several adjacent fields—has not yet been organized by a central theoretical model.

The Disparate Phenomena of Dress

Although psychological research on dress is not organized by a central theoretical model, various pockets of research have emerged across psychology and adjacent fields. K. Johnson and colleagues (2014) provide a useful review of these pockets, which we briefly summarize. One pocket of research explores perceivers’ inferences about women’s sexual interest based on their outfits (e.g., Farris et al., 2008 ; Mathes & Kempher, 1976 ; Montemurro & Gillen, 2013 ; Perilloux et al., 2012 ). Another, inspired by evolutionary theories of sexual selection, specifically considers the impact of the color red on perceived attractiveness ( Elliot et al., 2013 ; Kayser et al., 2010 ). Yet another pocket of research focuses instead on the influence of dress on the wearer’s cognition (e.g., enclothed cognition; Adam & Galinsky, 2012 ; Frank & Gilovich, 1988 ; Fredrickson et al., 1998 ).

Some research, often located in business journals, has measured how signals of wealth (e.g., a Timex versus a Rolex) influence judgments of targets ( Maaravi & Hameiri, 2019 ; Shutts et al., 2016 ). Another pocket of research, regularly found in applied professional journals, describes the effect of different types of dress on perceptions of professionalism and competence (e.g., street clothes vs. a blue medical coat vs. a white medical coat for nurse; Albert et al., 2008 ; Furnham et al., 2013 ) as they relate to outcomes such as job evaluations and hiring decisions. In personality psychology, work investigates the extent to which clothing (a) accurately signals wearers’ personality and (b) is used by perceivers to form impressions ( Gosling et al., 2002 ; Naumann et al., 2009 ). Finally, there is a smattering of work on how dress influences social categorization—that is, categorizing someone based on articles of clothing or accessories (e.g., lesbians and carabiners; conservatives and pearl earrings; punk rockers and safety pins; Carroll & Gilroy, 2002 ; Clarke, 2013 ; Hayfield, 2013 ).

Our intention in this section is not to provide a fully exhaustive review of literature on dress in psychology (for reviews, see K. Johnson et al., 2008 , 2014 ; Lennon et al., 2017 , 2014 ) but instead to highlight that dress research is largely restricted to tests of specific phenomena, such that there are currently no unified theoretical models describing how dress affects impressions. In the next section, we draw on existing theories and knowledge in person perception to propose an initial theoretical model of impressions that describes how they emerge from the combination of target face/body, target dress, and target context, as understood through the perceivers’ lens (e.g., their beliefs, stereotypes, attitudes, and preferences). Then, we will identify four factors of target dress in person perception to provide a framework within which we can organize past research and identify questions for future research.

Incorporating Dress Into Models of Impressions

Before discussing the specific facets of dress, it is important to place dress within a general model of person perception. Our model follows the theoretical statements made by the Dynamic Interactive model of person perception ( Freeman & Ambady, 2011 ; Freeman et al., 2020 ), in which emerging impressions of one feature of a target’s identity (e.g., their skin color) excite and constrain other connected features in a dynamic network. We distinguish our model from previous models of person perception by recognizing target dress as a feature of target identity that is sufficiently distinct from target face/body (which we collapse into one “factor” here) to merit its own separate consideration. Target face/body and target dress are markedly different. Target face/body is more stable, trait-like, and resistant to change. As such, the causal relation between targets’ cognition or identity and their face/body is weak to nonexistent. On the other hand, target dress is more state-like and malleable. As such, the causal relation between targets’ cognition or identity and their dress is likely stronger. In addition, target face/body and dress are separate but intimately linked. Target face/body causally influences target dress (i.e., people actively choose clothing to “amplify, downplay, and sometimes defy” aspects of the body; Daniels, 2021 , p. 358), and target dress is almost inevitably interpreted in conjunction with target face/body. We also include target context as another feature that influences perceivers’ judgments—that is, where the target is located, who they are with, what they are doing, and anything else that is external to both their body and their outfit.

Figure 1 depicts a working model of person perception in which perceivers dynamically and interactively form an impression of the target, simultaneously incorporating information about face/body, dress, and context. Perceivers make sense of this information through their own perceptual lens, incorporating their individual beliefs, stereotypes, attitudes, and preferences. To unpack “dynamically and interactively” more concretely, we refer to recent work by Freeman and colleagues (2020) , which describes initial social perceptions as the “rapid, yet gradual, process of negotiation between the multiple visual features inherent to a person . . . and the baggage a perceiver brings to the perceptual process” (p. 3).

Model of Person Perception Incorporating Target Dress.

Note. The perceiver makes sense of the target by simultaneously integrating the target’s dress, face/body, and context. This is done through the perceiver’s lens, which includes their cultural knowledge, stereotypes, attitudes, and preferences.

For example, imagine a target wearing a generally nondescript outfit but with safety pin accessories. One perceiver might have the cultural knowledge needed to associate wearing safety pins as signals of punk identity ( Rutten & van Dienderen, 2013 ). Because they hold positive attitudes toward people who identify as “punk,” they form a positive first impression of the target. However, another perceiver might not have this cultural knowledge, failing to identify this target as “punk.” This perceiver endorses negative stereotypes about the punk identity, but because they failed to identify this person as punk, these negative stereotypes never come into play and the perceiver relies on other cues to judge the target.

Another example highlights the interplay between target dress, target face/body, and target context. Imagine a perceiver who endorses negative Black stereotypes. In the context of an empty street at night, this perceiver might perceive a Black man (race identified by his skin color and face) wearing a hoodie as considerably more threatening than the same Black man wearing a suit and tie or a White man wearing either outfit. However, in the context of a restaurant in the middle of the day, the same perceiver might perceive similarly low threat in both the Black man wearing the hoodie and the same Black man wearing the suit and tie. The effect of context might be conceptualized in various ways (context could shift perceivers’ attention to threat, or maybe their Black threat stereotype is specifically about Black men in hoodies at night), but context undoubtedly moderates the interplay between perceiver lens, target face/body, and target dress.

The next section of the article will consider four specific factors of target dress, which describe the kinds of information perceivers infer from target dress. Throughout this next section, our proposed working model of person perception will be used to consider future research directions.

Factors of Dress in Person Perception

For this working model of person perception, we propose four factors within target dress: social categories, cognitive states, status, and aesthetics. These factors describe the types of inferences that perceivers make about targets based on targets’ dress. We clearly acknowledge that these four factors are not exhaustive, nor were they empirically derived: Instead, they are themes that emerged during the literature review that parsimoniously organize most of the existing literature on dress in person perception while also possessing clear links to non-dress research in social cognition. Notably, these four factors of dress emphasize inferences that are sometimes more readily conveyed by dress than by faces, bodies, or context. In other words, target dress covers different areas of the “space” underlying impression formation than other target factors—areas that, in some cases, may hardly be tapped in the absence of information about target dress. We consider this a useful organizing framework for existing literature and for future research, even if other researchers prefer alternative or additional groupings.

For each of these four factors, we will define and describe it; connect the factor with non-dress research in person perception and social cognition; identify existing dress research that fits within the factor; and describe future directions for research.

Social Categories

“The beltside key ring is one of the most enduring sartorial symbols of lesbian culture, one of the few stereotypes of our kind that’s both inoffensive and true” ( Cauterucci, 2016 ). The key ring has served as a reliable signal of lesbian identity in North America for the last several decades. Like the key ring, myriad visual markers of sexual identity and gender expression exist across cultures and time periods with the express purpose of identity signaling. In cultures for which non-normative identities lead to personal danger, these signals can be quite subtle and may require “insider” cultural knowledge to accurately detect. These subtle signals have been defined by sociologist Michael Brake as “argot,” the hidden meaning carried within articles of dress (Brake, 1985/ 2013 ). However, whether signals are subtle or blatant, perceivers with the cultural knowledge to understand signals use them to make inferences about the social identity of the target.

The social categories factor describes how perceivers use information provided by dress to identify targets with specific social categories, including (but not limited to) sexual preference, gender identity, race, ethnicity, nationality, religious group, and political affiliation. This also includes more specific identities associated with specific cultural groups or activities, such as identification with artistic or musical movements (e.g., reggae), sports or sports teams (e.g., Tarheels fan), social archetypes (e.g., emo), and occupations (e.g., firefighter). The questions perceivers are answering in this factor include “Who is this person?” “What groups does this person identify with?” and “What does this person believe?”

Connections to Social Cognition Research

Social categorization is a key topic in person perception. Modern theories such as the Dynamic Interactive model of person perception ( Freeman & Ambady, 2011 ; Freeman et al., 2020 ) posit that social categorization is a dynamic process in which various inputs—both bottom-up features of the face and body as well as top-down features such as perceivers’ stereotypes—interact with each other over time until a stable category judgment is reached. Some research has revealed that the clothing of targets does change the ease with which targets can be socially categorized, as non-stereotypical clothing activates competing response categories during the process of categorization ( Freeman et al., 2011 ). Although a recent review of this dynamic model ( Freeman et al., 2020 ) acknowledges the role of clothing and hairstyle (both aspects of dress) as bottom-up cues of social category, research on these cues—clothing in particular—is sparse.

The omission of dress from much of this work is problematic because dress may be highly relevant to the accuracy of categorization judgments. Perceivers who rely on facial information alone show high accuracy in judgments of some social categories (e.g., age, gender, race) and slightly “above chance” accuracy in judgments of more ambiguous social categories (e.g., sexual orientation, political and religious affiliation; Rule & Sutherland, 2017 ). However, unlike faces and bodies, dress is consciously chosen, sometimes specifically for its ability to signal social identity or for its value for performing one’s identity (e.g., one’s gendered or sexual self; see Morgenroth & Ryan, 2021 ). If a woman is wearing short hair, dungarees, lace-up boots, and a ring of keys (as in the Broadway song “Ring of Keys”; Tesori, 2013 ), this choice is intentional and more likely to be signal than noise. Thus, if perceivers were able to incorporate target dress alongside target faces, they might achieve higher accuracy when guessing others’ sexual orientation and religious affiliations, as well as aspects of personality that might also be thought of as “categories,” such as introversion/extroversion.

Even when dress is not chosen with high intentionality, it still contains residual information that can sometimes promote accurate judgments. Previous work has demonstrated that people’s inhabited environments (e.g., bedrooms, offices) contain various cues (e.g., a snowboard in the corner, a highly organized desk) that perceivers use to infer behaviors (e.g., snowboarding, organizing) that can then be linked to underlying personality traits (e.g., sensation seeking, conscientiousness; Gosling et al., 2002 ). Or, in other cases, perceivers might use “identity claims” (e.g., a cross or a rosary) to infer social categories (e.g., Christian), which then activate personality trait judgments via stereotyping. The accuracy of these cues varies depending on the specific trait, but some aspects of personality, such as openness to experience, can be accurately conveyed by these residual cues ( Gosling et al., 2002 ).

Integration of Existing Dress Research

Much of the research on dress and social categorization has focused on sexual preference, and even this literature is somewhat thin ( Clarke, 2013 ). Although ingroup perceivers have more intimate knowledge of dress cues for gay and lesbian sexual preferences, heterosexual university students also reported strong knowledge of the same cues, but referred to these cues as stereotypes and expressed reluctance to endorse these cues as meaningful signals ( Hayfield, 2013 ). This is in contrast to lesbians and gay men surveyed about the usefulness of various cues for accurately identifying ingroup members, who readily identified clothing style, clothing fit, and jewelry as cues that increase categorization accuracy ( Carroll & Gilroy, 2002 ).

Interestingly, many Western lesbians and gay men report feeling some degree of pressure to adopt the dress associated with their identities, creating tension between “sub-cultural authenticity” (dressing in a way that is clearly non-heterosexual) and “individual authenticity” (dressing based on personal tastes; Clarke & Spence, 2013 ). This “coercive element” (quoted in Clarke, 2013 , p. 3; Levitt et al., 2003 ; Y. Taylor, 2007 ) of dress and sexual identity may actually increase the accuracy of these cues. However, there is some evidence that this coercive element is weakening in younger generations (e.g., Wilkinson, 2015 ), which might lead to a subsequent decrease in the accuracy of certain cues, possibly due to changing attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community in the Western world ( Charlesworth & Banaji, 2019 ). Conversely, historical events can lead to dramatic increases or decreases in social identity signaling (e.g., women and compulsory hijabs in Iran following the Iranian Revolution; BBC, 2019 ).

Prior work has also examined the extent to which specific clothing cues—stylish versus unstylish, distinctive versus ordinary, neat versus messy—both (a) actually correspond with targets’ personalities (cue validity) and (b) are utilized by observers to make judgments (cue utilization; Naumann et al., 2009 ; Vazire et al., 2008 ). Some high-validity cues were utilized (e.g., distinctive appearance for openness to experience); some high-validity cues were not utilized (e.g., stylish appearance and extraversion); and some low-validity cues were nevertheless utilized (e.g., neat appearance and conscientiousness). Thus, this work highlights how heterogeneous both the validity and utilization of dress cues might be for inferring personality traits specifically (and, likely, ambiguous social categories more broadly).

Future Directions

Perceivers often rely on target dress as a source of information to infer targets’ identity, and these inferences in turn can lead to the application of cultural stereotypes. Furthermore, because targets choose their dress more than their face and body, inferences based on target dress are likely to be more accurate, though this varies to the extent that the dress is intended to signal identity. With these observations in mind, researchers might consider the extent to which perceivers’ categorization of targets on various dimensions of identity relies on target dress versus target face/body, using a descriptive variance-partitioning method ( Hehman et al., 2017 ; Hester, Xie, & Hehman, 2021 ; Xie et al., 2019 ). It might also be the case that some elements of dress (e.g., shoes; Gillath et al., 2012 ) provide more information about certain dimensions of identity than other elements of dress.

Researchers might also measure the extent to which target dress versus target face/body both lead to accurate judgments of identity across these various dimensions and are actually utilized by observers ( Gosling et al., 2002 ; Naumann et al., 2009 ). Relatedly, one might measure the relation between perceivers’ negative stereotypes of certain groups and their cultural knowledge of specific dress-related cues. In other words, how good are perceivers at accurately identifying the groups toward which they are prejudiced? How common are false positive or false negative judgments? Furthermore, are perceivers who have positive attitudes toward certain groups knowledgeable about dress-related cues but reluctant to use them for fear of being prejudiced?

In addition, longitudinal work might examine how cultural events change the strength of “coercion” for people with certain identities to wear certain kinds of clothing, and how this coercion subsequently influences the accuracy of perceiver judgments that rely on these aspects of target dress. Given the challenges of conducting this work with self-report information, it might be necessary to adopt novel strategies for studying cultural evolution, such as coding and analyzing variables over time using written and visual media (e.g., fashion magazines; see Kuipers et al., 2017 ; van der Laan & Kuipers, 2016 ) and creating quantitative ethnographic records ( Watts et al., 2022 ).

Cognitive States

It’s like armor to me. When I have a suit on I feel like all of a sudden, the world sees me differently. Cops aren’t staring, people wave back, people shake my hand, they open the door for me. It’s like I’m the president of the United States. ( Yi, 2015 )

In David Yi’s story on “Black Armor,” Alex Peay reflects on the bodily safety and confidence bestowed by formalwear. For Black men in the United States, police officers represent the persistent fear of being stopped, questioned, arrested, or harmed. These disparities may be partly rooted in police officers’ perceptions of Black men as threatening—that is, holding the intent to harm others or commit crimes ( Goff et al., 2014 ; Hester & Gray, 2018 ). Formalwear actively signals the absence of threatening intent, enabling Black men to navigate their environment more comfortably.

The cognitive states factor describes how perceivers use information provided by dress to make inferences about target cognition. In contrast with social categorization, which concerns a trait-level aspect of person perception, theory of mind concerns a state-level aspect of person perception—mental states such as goals and intentions fluctuate over time. The mental states perceivers might infer from dress include a person’s goals or motives, which could be either broadly defined (e.g., finding a sexual partner, inflicting harm on someone) or quite specific (e.g., attending a wedding, skipping school). The questions perceivers are answering in this factor include “What does this person want?” “What is this person doing?” and “Where is this person going?”

One obvious connection spanning social, developmental, and clinical psychology is research on theory of mind, which describes perceivers’ ability to infer others’ mental states. The information used by perceivers for theory of mind include situational cues (e.g., the “Sally-Anne” ball-hiding task; Baron-Cohen et al., 1985 ), emotion expression in the face and eyes ( Baron-Cohen et al., 2001 ; Fang et al., 2018 ; Montepare & Dobish, 2003 ), and body posture ( Abele & Yzerbyt, 2021 ; Dael et al., 2012 ). As theory of mind is an essential social-cognitive process for navigating the world, its early developmental trajectory has been thoroughly mapped ( Astington & Jenkins, 1995 ; Shahaeian et al., 2011 ).

In the early days of social psychology, role theory played a dominant part in researchers’ understanding of attitudes and behaviors. Although a full review of role theory is beyond the scope of this article, roles are generally defined as social scripts a person is expected to follow (either prescriptively or based on perceivers’ own beliefs about the role; Biddle, 1986 ). For example, if a person is identified as a police officer, then their perceived role might be to protect the populous (as culturally prescribed) or protect the status of the majority group (as believed by some).

Recent work has proposed a “Relevance Appraisal Matrix,” in which perceivers infer to what extent a person represents opportunity and threat on distinct dimensions based on current goals ( Lassetter et al., 2021 ; Neel & Lassetter, 2019 ). This relevance incorporates both the current context and perceptions of the face/body to make inferences about both the stable traits and the current mental state of targets—key information for deciding whether the target is relevant to goals such as “avoid physical harm” or “find a sexual partner.” Target dress undoubtedly plays a role in these mental state inferences, especially given the bodies of research specifically investigating biases in perceptions of threat ( Baumann & DeSteno, 2010 ; Green & Phillips, 2004 ; Todd et al., 2016 ) and biases in men’s perceptions of women’s sexual interest ( Perilloux et al., 2012 ; Treat et al., 2015 ).

One long-enduring line of dress research investigates how clothing sometimes indicates a specific role in society—that is, a person’s occupation, the functions that they are expected to serve, and the specific behaviors expected from them. Leslie Davis (1984) provides a useful review of early dress research relevant to role theory. Highlights from her review include uniforms strongly defining roles and leading perceivers to expect certain behaviors of target ( Joseph & Alex, 1972 ); street clothes causing nurses to receive more positive responses from many patients because of negative beliefs about nurses in uniforms ( Rinn, 1976 ); and non-militaristic police officer uniforms leading perceivers to have more positive expectations of and interactions with officers ( Tenzel & Cizanckas, 1973 ).

In some cases, occupations or contexts are coded to various social groups as well, such that perceivers associate the “correct” disposition with signals of Whiteness, maleness, or other identities. For example, Black people—especially Black women—experience pressure to conform to Eurocentric hairstyles when working in professional environments ( Dawson et al., 2019 ; Rosette & Dumas, 2007 ), with Afrocentric hairstyles eliciting lower ratings of professionalism for Black women ( A. M. Johnson et al., 2017 ; Koval & Rosette, 2021 ; Opie & Phillips, 2015 ). Given the high personal, social, and financial costs of maintaining Eurocentric hairstyles, professional Black women face an ongoing double bind with regard to their hair. Similarly, women in male-dominated occupations manage the balancing act of adopting conventional male attire to belong and signal competence while still maintaining femininity and attractiveness (see S. K. Johnson et al., 2010 ; Sheppard & Johnson, 2019 ).

Another line of research focuses on how women’s dress influences perceivers’ judgments of their sexual interest. This work, in line with other heteronormative trends in dress research, focuses on straight Western male reactions to female targets. Researchers have found that perceivers judged female targets wearing sexually provocative dress as more attractive, sexually appealing, and interested in sexual acts, but also judged these female targets as more likely to cheat in relationships and use sex to manipulate men for gain ( Abbey et al., 1987 ; K. Johnson & Workman, 1992 ; Mathes & Kempher, 1976 ; Maurer & Robinson, 2008 ; Montemurro & Gillen, 2013 ). Relatedly, other research concerns the “sexiness” or formality (manipulated via combinations of color, fit, and cut) of women’s dress and consequences in various professional settings, such as job interviews ( Forsythe, 1990 ; K. Johnson & Roach-Higgins, 1987 ), classical music auditions ( Griffiths, 2008 , 2010 ; Urbaniak & Mitchell, 2022 ), and university lectures ( Lukavsky et al., 1995 ; Morris et al., 1996 ). Again, research in this area has largely focused on impressions of women specifically (with exceptions; see Furnham et al., 2013 ; Slabbert, 2019 ).

The extent to which perceivers incorporate dress into inferences about cognitive states depends both on the target’s dress and the perceiver’s beliefs about that dress. Researchers might examine perceivers’ cultural knowledge and beliefs about various types of dress. For example, some perceivers might associate hoodies or chains with intention to harm or short skirts and heels with intention to engage in sexual acts, while other perceivers might not. These patterns of belief likely correspond with other aspects of the perceiver, such as endorsement of racial or sexual prejudice. Researchers might also examine the range of signals that various types of dress might give, both overall and for individual perceivers. For example, due to different experiences and associations, a perceiver who grew up in a poor rural community might see someone wearing a blazer and imply that this person is going to church, a wedding, or a funeral. On the other hand, a perceiver who grew up in an affluent neighborhood might instead imply that this person is going to work or attending a party.

Dress might also signal cognitive states as a function of target face/body. For example, formalwear might shift perceptions of threat most strongly for Black male targets who are very tall or muscular ( Hester & Gray, 2018 ; Wilson et al., 2017 ; Yi, 2015 ). Or, conservative dress might shift perceptions of sexual interest the most for female targets whose face and body align with the perceivers’ ideal of attractiveness. Finally, perceivers might infer different intended behaviors from the same clothing based on body size. For example, basketball shorts or sweatpants might signal going to work out for targets who weigh less and dressing for comfort for targets who weigh more.

Another promising future direction might explore laypeople’s understanding of how clothing signals mental states and how they strategically use this information. As described in the story, some Black men don formalwear to actively mitigate associations with threat ( Yi, 2015 ). And, although inferences of sexual interest from clothing sometimes lead to inaccurate inferences about the wearers’ mental state, people sometimes intentionally choose to wear clothing that signals lower or higher sexual interest. People’s use of dress-related strategies is not well-defined in the literature, and initial research on this topic would be best served by more qualitative and descriptive methods.

In 1577, Queen Elizabeth I of England proclaimed (edited for clarity):

“The briefe content of certayne Actes of Parliament, agaynst th’inordinate use of apparell. None shall weare in his apparell any Silke of the colour of purpure; Cloth of golde, Tissue; But onlye the Kyng, Quene, and Kinges Mother, Chyldren, Brethré, Sisters, Uncles & Auntes; and Except Dukes & Marquesses, to be may weare in dublets and sleevelesse cotes, Cloth of Gold, of Tissue, not exceadyng. v. if. the yarde, and Purpure in mantelles of the Garter” ( The Briefe Content of Certayne Actes of Parliament, Agaynst Th’inordinate Use of Apparell, 1577 )

This particular sumptuary law goes on for several more paragraphs, yoking dress to social class (which corresponds strongly with wealth) to such a degree that one’s social class could be easily and accurately inferred from one’s dress. Although this phenomenon plays out more subtly now, dress still plays a vital role in the signaling of status.

The status factor describes how perceivers use information provided by dress to make inferences about the wealth, social class, and power of the target. Although this factor might arguably be collapsed with social categories (e.g., a rich person versus a poor person), it merits its own factor simply because dress is specifically and intimately related to wealth and social class, and wealth is more consequentially linked to power and agency than most other kinds of social categorization. Clothing has functioned throughout history to explicitly signal wealth and social class. The questions perceivers are answering in this factor include “How much power does this person have?” “How many resources does this person have?” and “What is this person’s standing in society?”

“Conspicuous consumption” is an economics term coined by Thorstein Veblen that describes the consumption of goods for the purpose of signaling wealth and/or social class ( Veblen, 1912 ). So powerful is the ability of some goods to signal wealth that their value and demand are characterized by a Veblen curve—as market value increases, demand also increases (e.g., Bagwell & Bernheim, 1996 ; Sundie et al., 2010 ). The conspicuous nature of this consumption demands that the item be visible and understandable to perceivers, which is a clear characteristic of clothing, jewelry, and other aspects of dress.

Adam Smith, an 18th-century economist and philosopher, argued that the desire for status and wealth is near-universal and that being high status is associated with various benefits ( Smith, 1776 ). Status anxiety is associated with negative health and societal outcomes ( Layte & Whelan, 2014 ; Pickett & Wilkinson, 2010 ) and low subjective social status is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, and lower well-being ( Schneider, 2019 ; Tang et al., 2016 ). Low subjective social status appears to increase status-seeking behavior; for example, increased perceptions of income inequality correspond with increased conspicuous consumption ( Du et al., 2022 ) and the frequency of internet searches for common status objects—most of which are articles of clothing—moderates the link between income inequality and risk-taking behavior ( Payne et al., 2017 ).

Social identity can also correspond with lower subjective social status and incentivize specific groups to prioritize subjective status. For example, Black and Latine people in the United States spend a larger percentage of income to purchase visible luxury goods as a means of signaling status, an effect that is partly explained by actual disparities in income between groups ( Charles et al., 2009 ). Furthermore, some American women report prioritizing wealth and status in their selection of men as mating partners ( Buss & Schmitt, 1993 ; Li & Kenrick, 2006 ) and perceive men with more resources as more attractive ( Wang et al., 2018 ), a reflection of long-standing social structures in which women’s primary means of social mobility was via marriage (though other work argues that these gendered preferences are weaker or nonexistent, at least in an American setting; Eastwick & Finkel, 2008 ). This lay understanding of women’s (and society’s) emphasis on high status for men may motivate men to engage in conspicuous consumption to improve their life and dating prospects ( Griskevicius et al., 2007 ). Women’s preference for men signaling high status and men’s desire to consume high-status goods increased for participants primed with scarcity ( Bradshaw et al., 2020 ).

Although perceivers might infer targets’ social status or wealth from their consumption, they are unlikely to do so very accurately from facial cues ( Bjornsdottir et al., 2022 ; Bjornsdottir & Rule, 2017 ). Body-related cues, such as body mass index, might provide better information about social status and wealth due to gender-moderated “social gradients” of body mass index as a function of income and education ( Claassen et al., 2019 ). Comparatively, target dress likely provides the most accurate information about social status and wealth.

The inference of social status and wealth from dress manifests as early as 4 years of age. For example, Western children infer social status from the “new” versus “worn” state of objects such as blue jeans, mittens, and backpacks, and they associate this higher status with higher competence and health ( Shutts et al., 2016 ).

Unsurprisingly, major differences in target dress (e.g., suit versus fast food uniform; Townsend & Levy, 1990 ) yield differences in impressions. However, perceivers also pick up on subtler cues. For example, perceivers rate men wearing custom-tailored suits, rather than off-the-rack suits, as more successful, salaried, and confident ( Howlett et al., 2013 ). Brand names likely also make a difference. Notably, the effects of these dress-based status cues are persistent. Perceivers rated targets in “richer” clothing as more competent than targets in “poorer” clothing even when stimuli were presented for only 129 ms, when they were explicitly told that the clothing is not an accurate cue of competence, and when they were told to ignore clothing ( Oh et al., 2020 ). Determinants of “status” may also differ for men and women. One study found that perceivers used formal dress to predict the status of male university faculty and staff, which contributed to accuracy because formal dress did correspond with their status. However, they did not use formal dress to predict the status of female university faculty and staff, and formal dress did not actually correspond with their status ( Mast & Hall, 2004 ).

Finally, the fashion norms in higher-status locations exert greater influence on individuals in these locations than the norms in lower-status locations. For example, women moving from a higher- to a lower-status neighborhood are more likely to continue wearing the same type of shoe compared with women moving from a lower- to a higher-status neighborhood, who are conversely more likely to adopt the local shoe norms ( Galak et al., 2016 ).

Research investigating the relation between dress and perceived status might start by mapping out variability in perceiver’s cultural knowledge and beliefs about the meaning of dress cues as conspicuous consumption, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Understandings of “rich” versus “poor” dress might vary considerably both between-culture and within-culture (as a function of socioeconomic status [SES] and other factors), as well as across time. One growing trend among high-SES consumers is the idea of “inconspicuous consumption,” in which classic conspicuous brands such as Coach, Rolex, and Hermès have been traded out for little-known boutique brands that only “in-the-know” consumers would recognize ( Eckhardt et al., 2015 ). A related finding at the very high end of status is the “red sneakers effect,” which describes how nonconforming behavior (such as entering a luxury boutique or a board meeting wearing ripped denim, Vans, and a t-shirt) signals status ( Bellezza et al., 2014 ). Finally, in some circles, vintage clothing is an indicator of status despite the used nature of the clothing, because vintage dress “requires a certain amount of cultural and economic capital” that necessitates both disposable income and free time ( Veenstra & Kuipers, 2013 , p. 356).

The meaning of dress-related status cues might also differ depending on other aspects of the target, such as their race, gender, and age. Men’s dress might determine perceived status more than women’s dress, and clear status cues such a bespoke suit or a nice watch might influence perceptions of Black or Latine targets more than perceptions of White targets because of greater deviation from baseline expectations. Similarly, perceivers might infer greater wealth from a Rolex watch on the wrist of a high schooler than they do from the same watch on the wrist of a middle-aged adult.

Furthermore, most investigations of status cues focus on specific clothing items or entire outfits that cue high or low status. Researchers might consider how pairing conspicuous dress objects with otherwise very casual and low-status outfits influences perceptions of status. This kind of nonchalant combination might be especially effective at signaling status, in line with the concept of sprezzatura , an Italian word referring to seemingly effortless (and thus desirable) aesthetic expression that requires a certain degree of confidence and cultural knowledge (see D’Angelo, 2018 ).

Early ideas about aesthetic appreciation identified the locus of beauty in objects themselves. However, by the eighteenth century, philosophers such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant adopted “eye of the beholder” arguments instead, placing beauty squarely in the minds of the perceivers ( Sartwell, 2017 ):

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. ( David Hume, 1757 , p. 230)

It is doubtless the case that perceivers express idiosyncratic preferences or “tastes” regarding aesthetics—people simply have favorite colors, patterns, shapes, designs, and so on. 1 Aesthetic taste thus plays a unique and crucial role in how dress influences perceptions of others.

The aesthetics factor describes how perceivers’ preferences for basic elements of dress, such as color, fit, cut, texture, and so forth, influence impressions of targets. These preferences emerge from a mix of cultural influences and personal idiosyncrasies. Although this factor overlaps some with the first three factors, it crucially accounts for the fact that perceivers simply “like” or “dislike” certain kinds of outfits independent of any signaling of social category, cognitive state, or status. This is not unlike how people show preferences for art that are unexplained by the arts’ specific message or themes—preferred combinations of colors, shapes, textures, and patterns vary widely. We expect that this factor will demonstrate especially high amounts of perceiver and perceiver-by-target variability. The questions perceivers are answering in this factor include “Do I like what this person is wearing?” and “Does this person looks good in this kind of outfit?”

Research on aesthetic elements in social cognition is limited in scope. Of the various aesthetic elements of dress, perhaps the most thoroughly researched topic is color. Much of the recent work on color in social cognition is grounded in evolutionary theory, attempting to draw parallels between human and nonhuman responses to specific colors. For example, red (as expressed in the reddening of the face or the skin) is characterized as a testosterone-based indicator in competitive interactions between males, and thus appears to signal dominance in some contexts ( Elliot & Maier, 2014 ; Hill & Barton, 2005 ). Color-in-context theory integrates biology-based and context-based meanings of colors and states that the meaning of color varies depending on the motivations and mental states of perceivers ( Elliot & Maier, 2012 ). In this way, aesthetic preferences for color might emerge from functional preferences. Although much of this evolutionary-based work focuses on psychological universals in how color influences cognition, it is essential to highlight cultural heterogeneity in color preferences—for example, British and Himba color preferences overlap very little and Himba color preferences display none of the “universal” patterns claimed elsewhere ( C. Taylor et al., 2012 ).

The most prominent research on aesthetic properties of dress concerns effects of red clothing on judgments of attractiveness and dominance (e.g., Elliot et al., 2013 ; Kayser et al., 2010 ). This work mostly draws on the same evolutionary-based theory discussed earlier, which associates red with testosterone and competition ( Hill & Barton, 2005 ). The color black has also received some attention for its potential to increase perceived attractiveness ( S. C. Roberts et al., 2010 ) and experienced dominance ( Frank & Gilovich, 1988 ). These color effects do not seem to apply equally across gender dyads ( S. C. Roberts et al., 2010 ). Finally, research suggests that the moderate matching of colors (not too similar, not too contrasting) might yield the most positive first impressions ( Gray et al., 2014 ).

Other research on color concerns perceivers’ color preferences across time and place. A recent review of color preferences over time ( Kodžoman et al., 2022 ) suggests that Western color preferences for dress have shown some stability over the past 100 years, with blue and red ranking higher in preference. However, the review points out some methodological limitations and finds that current color preferences for dress include yellow, pink, and black. Gender differences also emerge, with women rating yellow and white more highly than men ( Kodžoman et al., 2022 ). Outside of scientific dress research, it is worth noting that preferences for dress clearly vary across time and place. The Western female-pink connection only emerged in the 1940s ( Stamberg, 2014 ), and black, often viewed as a ubiquitous color in fashion, only became a common color in South Korean women’s clothing in the 1980s ( Seok & Geum, 2012 ).

Although some work has been done on cultural and individual preferences for color, the current scientific understanding of perceivers’ aesthetic preferences is limited. Descriptive work might conduct a broad census of color, fit, cut, and style preferences with the aim of describing variability in these preferences across individuals and cultures. This type of approach can be valuable for understanding the types of predictors that might explain variability in preferences ( Hester, Xie, & Hehman, 2021 ), which can inform subsequent work that considers how preferences vary systematically as a function of gender, race, age, and so on. Specific cultural influences might also emerge: for example, the association of specific colors or patterns with religion, politics, or nationality might shape perceiver preferences for these elements in dress.

Future work might also consider how perceiver preferences for specific aesthetic elements might be shaped by aspects of targets’ faces and bodies. A veritable mountain of magazine articles describes how certain colors of clothing look better on certain colors of skin; how different body types are flattered by specific cuts of clothing; how specific types of glasses frames suit specific face shapes; and how hairstyle should take into consideration the color, thickness, and natural tendencies of one’s hair. Researchers might measure the extent to which these popular recommendations influence and/or align with perceiver judgments.

In addition, little to no research has examined how dress influences perceptions of people with disabilities. On one hand, people with disabilities are not able to easily wear some articles of dress ( Esmail et al., 2022 ). On the other hand, people with disabilities can make conscious decisions about specific design elements of physical aids such as wheelchairs, prosthetics, canes, and walkers. For example, one video commentator highlights the light-up casters and pink wheels of her new wheelchair ( Joci Scott, 2021 ) and an online search for “wheelchair accessories” yields various joystick knobs, handle covers, foot slings, and other items that are clearly elements of dress. Future research might qualitatively survey people with disabilities to learn more about how physical aids are used as dress. Then, using this information, researchers might use variance partitioning to describe the extent to which these unique dress elements account for perceptions of people with disabilities.

Researchers might also consider the extent to which people’s aesthetic preferences for others’ dress matches their aesthetic preferences for their own dress. On one hand, there is ample evidence that people’s preferences for others tends to resemble their own preferences ( Montoya et al., 2008 ). On the other hand, preferences for others’ dress appear to be strongly organized according to gender norms (and, to lesser degrees, other norms), such that people might prefer clear contrasts in aesthetics between men and women. Notably, this gendered concept of attractiveness appears to be loosening recently in both Western and some East Asian cultures as people’s gender concepts also become less rigid.

Challenges and Recommendations

This working model of dress in person perception highlights many exciting directions for future research. However, the sprawling and complex nature of these research ideas presents both theoretical and methodological challenges. We discuss some of these challenges and offer recommendations.

The sheer complexity of target dress—both on its own (e.g., full outfits comprised of several elements) and in combination with perceiver characteristics, target face/body, and target context—presents difficult theoretical challenges. When there are so many potentially interlocking parts, how can researchers accurately theorize about phenomena? Here, we find guidance in intersectional perspectives on psychology, which both warn against over-valuing parsimony in models ( McCormick-Huhn et al., 2019 ; Settles et al., 2020 ; Warner et al., 2016 ) but also acknowledge the necessity of constraining conditions to conduct empirical research ( Warner, 2008 ). Because the meaning of dress is so culturally variant, we recommend that research on dress draw broadly from outside of psychology to support hypotheses and justify the inclusion and exclusion of specific aspects of target dress (as well as other relevant variables). This sociohistorical approach to psychology has yielded insights into human cognition that do not readily emerge from a purely psychological perspective. This approach is most commonly seen in cross-cultural work examining differences in self-construal ( Kitayama et al., 1997 ; Markus & Kitayama, 1991 ), racial categorization ( Goh & McCue, 2021 ), tightness-looseness ( Gelfand et al., 2011 ; Jackson et al., 2021 ), attitudes toward older adults ( North & Fiske, 2015 ), and many others. Sociohistorical approaches can also be used to understand processes in more constrained cultural settings, as is the case in work examining social dominance orientation ( Ho et al., 2012 ; Sidanius et al., 1994 ) and hypodescent ( Cooley et al., 2018 ; Ho et al., 2011 ; Krosch et al., 2013 ). Given the breadth of research examining fashion, a similarly broad perspective is essential for moving toward a comprehensive model of target dress in person perception.

Another recommendation for navigating the complexity and scope of target dress is to embrace descriptive research as a necessary first step toward predictive models and theories. Without closely observing myriad fauna and flora, Charles Darwin would not have been able to develop a theory of evolution. In the same vein, we suggest that the simple observation and description of perceivers’ judgments of target dress, as well as the “lenses” through which they understand target dress, is necessary before trying to formulate comprehensive theories of person perception that include target dress.

Perhaps the biggest methodological challenge for studying dress is creating adequate stimulus sets for perceivers to judge. Of particular note is the issue of separating effects of target body from target dress—ideally, a stimulus set would fill in a “matrix” in which many types of bodies are depicted wearing many types of clothing. For this reason, the development of large, coded sets of stimuli featuring full crosses between body and clothing (and the inclusion of photographs with and without faces) would facilitate future research. These types of databases for facial stimuli have been of great utility (e.g., Ma et al., 2015 ; Saribay et al., 2018 ). However, the challenges of forming such databases for target dress are considerably higher. More importantly, even if generalizable and representative dress datasets were ever created, these datasets might quickly become dated due to the quickly shifting styles and meanings of dress. This challenge is not present with biologically constrained stimuli, such as faces. It might be the case that investing time and resources into creating a representative clothing database would not be worthwhile.

For this reason, researchers may need to develop their own specific stimulus sets—motivated specifically by their research questions—by drawing on existing photographs and using photo editing techniques. One promising direction that might help “solve” the conundrum of dress stimuli is the development of Generative Adversarial Networks that specifically generate novel images of clothing ( Ak et al., 2019 ; Cheng, 2020/ 2021 ). With some adjustments, this approach might have the potential to generate sets of realistic-looking images across target body type, target dress, and target face. Although this type of computer-generated dataset might not be fully representative of current styles of clothing, it may nevertheless allow for a more wide-ranging set of dress stimuli to be created at little cost. Researchers have also created fairly realistic-looking stimulus sets that vary face, body, and clothing by using photo-editing software to swap faces onto bodies and match the luminance of the skin ( Connor et al., 2023 ).

Once researchers have stimulus sets in place, within-subject designs should be used whenever feasible for two reasons. First, these designs offset the otherwise substantial costs of collecting enough data to example more complex issues. Second, these designs can often facilitate the partitioning of variance into different sources ( Hehman et al., 2019 ; Kenny et al., 2006 ). For example, research has described the extent to which variability in impressions of faces is broadly caused by perceiver characteristics, target characteristics, or interactions between perceiver and target characteristics ( Hehman et al., 2017 ; Hönekopp, 2006 ; Xie et al., 2019 , 2021 ). This approach is useful for describing the “landscape” of variance when exact predictors of interest are unclear or too numerous to measure and model.

Taking to heart the value of descriptive work, researchers might also consider the use of qualitative methods to collect rich, nuanced information about how impressions might emerge from combinations of perceiver, target, and contextual factors. In the same way that qualitative and mixed methods approaches promote understanding of complex phenomena such as intersectional stereotyping and discrimination ( Cole, 2009 ; Else-Quest & Hyde, 2016 ), they may also promote understanding of the role of target dress in person perception.

Researchers must also consider the cultural background of both the perceivers and the targets. The primary constraint on generality in research on dress and person perception is that the findings synthesized in this review predominantly rely on ratings of White American perceivers presented with White American targets. First, regardless of the perceivers and targets sampled, researchers should carefully assess and accurately portray the generalizability of their findings. Second, to achieve greater generalizability, researchers might sample broadly from various locations; create more representative stimulus sets, especially when it is clearly relevant to the present hypotheses; incorporate sociohistorical approaches to make meaningful predictions about the meaning of dress in specific cultural settings; and form research teams that represent a broader range of cultural backgrounds. To the latter two points, the authors of this paper are North American cis straight men—the first is half-Filipino and half-White, and the second is White. Both are academic experts on person perception and stereotyping, and the first author is additionally (a) someone who uses an intersectional lens to examine psychological phenomena and (b) a clothing/style enthusiast in general. However, given the singular nature of identity, many other lived experiences of the importance of dress are only indirectly accessible to the authors. Considering this positionality is important, particularly given that much of the cited research in this paper is led by cis White American men, particularly the older work in person perception and social cognition.

Finally, to better capture the extensive cultural variability in perceivers’ understandings of target dress, a multi-lab collaborative approach might be necessary to collect a globally diverse dataset with accurately translated instructions and questions. This step would likely come after the landscape of target dress and person perception has been sufficiently described, as multi-lab collaborations are time-intensive and expensive. However, as illustrated by the Psychological Science Accelerator ( Jones et al., 2021 ; Moshontz et al., 2018 ), the dividends paid by this type of collaboration are substantial—for example, one project in this vein yielded over 11 million ratings of 120 faces across 45 countries ( Jones et al., 2021 ) as a means of evaluating heterogeneity in the factor structure of face perception across cultures.

Legendary costume designer Edith Head once stated that “[y]ou can have anything you want in life, if you dress for it.” This quote captures the undeniable importance of dress in shaping people’s impressions of others. And yet, dress is notably absent from decades of theorizing about first impressions, which has emphasized the role of faces and bodies. The result is a mismatch between how first impressions unfold in the lab—a parade of floating heads and gray-white backgrounds—and how they unfold in the world—a whirling of faces, fabrics, bodies, and baubles. Social psychology is past due in recognizing and accounting for the essential role of target dress in person perception. Doing so might require a shift in priorities, eschewing the traditional emphasis on parsimony and psychological universals in favor of necessary complexity and cultural variability. This process will require some trial and error—not unlike putting together an outfit for a job interview or a first date—but the effort will be well worth it.

Acknowledgments

We thank Hannah Shiller and Chevieve Heri for their help with compiling and categorizing papers for the literature review.

1. William James had a particular fondness for polka dot ties, which were notably unfashionable at the time (see Watson, 2004 ).

Author Contributions: Conceived paper: N.H. Literature review: N.H. Writing—Original Draft: N.H. Writing—Review and Editing: Both authors.

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding: The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Self Identity — Understanding the Notion of Personal Perception

Understanding The Notion of Personal Perception

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Introduction, self-schemas, the self-reference effect, self identify vs self-concept, self complexity vs self concept, self conscious vs self-awareness.

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Psychology Discussion

Individual factors in perception | perception | psychology.

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After reading this article you will learn about the biological, psychological, personality and cultural factors in perception.

A. Biological Motives :

Several interesting experiments have been conducted to see how needs like hunger, sex etc. influence perception. In one experiment by Levine, Chein and Murphy vague and blurred pictures were presented to a group of individuals who were deprived of food for different lengths of time- three hours, six hours and nine hours.

It was found that people who had not eaten for six and nine hours perceived the ambiguous images as pictures of food much more frequently than the group which had eaten only three hours previously. The group which had been deprived for nine hours, however, showed a drop in food-related perceptions- as if the hunger had gone beyond a peak of intensity and had died.

B. Psychological Motives:

Reward and Punishment :

It is common knowledge that reward and punishment influence the learning process. But it is less easy to understand how one’s perception of an object can be influenced in a similar manner. Solley and Santos used drawings of ‘Necker cubes’ as in the following manner (see Fig.7.19). In the altered cubes to the left and right only one perspective could be seen when seen for one second. The cube in the centre could be seen as having either perspective.

The experimenter verbally rewarded the perception of one of the altered cubes. It was found that as the experiment progressed, i.e. as the amount of verbal reward increased, the subjects perceived the natural cube more and more only in the perspective for which they have been rewarded. This incidentally also provides evidence for the role of learning in perception.

Different individuals attach different values to various objects. These differences result in differences in their perception of these objects. In their famous experiment Bruner & Goodman showed that poor children place a higher value on money than do rich children and this higher value results in an over-estimation of the size of the coins in their perception and memory. Further the amount of over- estimation was greater for the higher denomination coins than the lower ones.

The judgement of size, therefore, was being influenced by the judgement of value and desirability. One can think of many instances in everyday life in which we perceive the physical properties of objects differently depending upon our judgement of its value. For example, a fake necklace worn by a rich woman is often perceived as having all the properties of real diamond, while a genuine diamond necklace worn by a poor woman is seen as being cheap and artificial.

C. Personality Factors and Cognitive Styles :

Of the individual factors which influence perception, not only are those which vary from moment-to-moment and those which are determined by social factors, such as values and beliefs, but also those which are lasting characteristics of the personality. Cognitive style refers to the manner in which individuals differ in certain dimensions and the way in which they handle perceptual and cognitive information.

Witkin and others, in a series of experiments on cognitive styles and certain perceptual skills, discovered that it is possible to classify people along the poles of a general dichotomy called field dependent, and field independent. This dimension refers to the extent to which individuals are dependent upon the context or ‘field’ in their perceptions, thoughts, social judgements, etc.

A typical test of field independence is the Rod and Frame Test, in which the subject, deprived of other visual cues, has to adjust a rod to the true vertical, while overcoming the distorting effects of a tilted frame surrounding it. The field- independent individuals are able to overcome the influence of the field (i. e. the frame) and approximate the true vertical much more accurately than the field- dependent people.

Witkin found that this perceptual field independence was highly correlated with the social ability to be independent of others, the presence of a strong self-identity and with conceptual clarity. The field-independent people were more analytical in their approach to social or perceptual tasks, while the field-dependent people were more global in their approach.

Other styles of perceiving and judging have also been found. One interesting dimension, identified by Holzman and Klein, is the distinction between ‘levellers’ and ‘sharpeners’. It has been found that if people were shown a series of highly similar stimuli, with only very gradual variations in them, some people tend to ignore the variations, thus ‘leveling’ all differences from the norm, while others tend to be very sensitive to the slightest variations, thus ‘sharpening’ the existing differences.

It was found that ‘levellers’ tended also to be rather rigid in their beliefs, attitudes and social judgements. They tended not to perceive those elements of reality which ran counter to their existing beliefs, thus, seeing reality as validating the beliefs. Sharpeners, on the other hand, were more flexible, tending to notice all evidence which challenged their beliefs and assumptions, thus, having to change their beliefs to fit reality rather than misperceive reality to fit their beliefs.

The term ‘set’ refers to the factor of readiness or anticipation in a person at the time of perceiving particular objects or events. Set is the state of preparedness of the perceiver at any given moment. Knowing or expecting in advance what we may perceive can influence our perception.

This can be demonstrated by using the Fig.7.20. Show this figure to your friend and ask him to look at it carefully and tell you which alphabets they can see. Show the same figure to another friend and ask them what sort of tools they see in this figure, i. e. give one person an instructional set to see alphabets and another person an instructional set to see tools.

Exposure of the figure should be only for about a tenth of a second. Invariably, a person who has received suggestions that a particular thing is likely to be seen will actually perceive that thing. A person who is told that the figure shows certain tools will set one’s mind to seeking tool-like structures, and is unlikely to see alphabets and vice versa.

D. Cultural Factors :

Cultural influences play a vital part in perception. For example, members of the early tribal communities often develop different perceptual capacities compared to members who live in cities. Research studies on perception have shown that American children who live in cities could discriminate various geometrical designs and different shades of colours.

On the other hand, tribal children who live in wilderness showed a greater capacity for discrimination of different sounds and smells which appeared indistinguishable to children living in big cities. An interesting observation recorded by C.M. Tumbull in this connection was about the Bambuti pygmies of Congo who rarely venture out of the forest and are, therefore, not used to looking at far-off objects. Tumbull observed that from a distance, one of the pygmies could not recognise a herd of buffaloes.

On getting closer to the animals, he believed that they were getting magically larger in size. He was unable to grasp the fact that the buffaloes had actually remained constant in size. His eyes transmitted the same message to his brain as those of people who were brought up in other cultures. The only difference was in the way the pygmy interpreted the messages. His perception of the situation was different from Tumbull’s.

More recently, researchers like Berry, Dasen and others have found cultural differences in perceptual skills related to the field independence-dependence dimension. It was found that the more complex and ‘differentiated’ the physical and social environment in which an individual grows up, the more sophisticated and field independent is that individual likely to be- both in relation to the physical environment and the people.

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Individual Factors in Perception , Perception , Psychology

Perception, Stereotype and Empathy Essay

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Introduction

From stereotype to empathy, perception and art, works cited.

Perception is defined as the process through which various organisms sense what is going on in the environment in which they live. As a result, they are able to interpret what is perceived thus developing meaningful interpretation. In other words it is the process by which human beings give an understanding of the information that they sense such as what they see, hear, feel, taste or smell (Lindsay & Norman 7). Perception is amongst the oldest concepts in psychology and its study resulted in the formation of Gestalt School of Psychology. Past experiences that a given individual went through such as cultural issues greatly determine such an individual’s perception.

Perception can be accurate or not. For example, in some cases it has resulted in stereotyping. In this paper two activities are conducted. The first activity is from stereotype to empathy whose purpose is to brainstorm various ways to build empathy based on personal experiences with stereotyping. The second activity will relate to perception and art. The purpose of this activity is to illustrate that people have different perceptions. An explanation of the reasons that result into this will be given.

The purpose of this activity is to brainstorm ways to build empathy based on my own personal experiences with stereotyping. This arises from the fact that people hold different beliefs about certain social groups of people or different individuals. For example, some people are believed to be wise, others smart, while others are believed to be thieves amongst others. These public beliefs about people are what we refer to as stereotypes and can either be positive or negative but in most cases they are negative. This process of categorising and making assumptions about members of a particular group of people because they belong to that group is called stereotyping. As an individual, I have had some stereotype concerning black (Africans) Americans.

African Americans’ stereotype

Some of my stereotypes relating to Africans-Americans include believing that black people are dumb. This means that they are not able to express their needs in addition to being lazy. The resultant effect is that black African Americans are poor. In addition, these individuals are uncivilised, smelly and unchristian or un-devoted Christian who went to church just to sing gospel music (Charles 13). I also hold believe that black people are slaves and that they practice witchcraft. These stereotypes resulted from different sources as discussed below.

Sources of Africans Americans stereotype

Most of the stereotypes about African-Americans resulted from the media owned by white colonialists. For instance, in many televisions programmes, most of the characters who act as dumb and lazy are Africans.As a result, most of the people have believed that this is the case. In addition, Africans Americans are presented in scenes where they are engaging themselves in witchcraft in these television programmes. As a result, they are believed to be witches. Moreover, these stereotypes came from the colonizers.The fact that African-Americans are black make many people believe that they are dull even in their mind as their colour.

Lastly, the source of stereotype arises from the fact that most of the Africans-Americans who settled in U.S first were slaves.Therefore, all the other that came after them are believed to posses the same attributes. Most of my friends and relatives hold these stereotypes concerning Africans-Americans since we have all been made to believe this. However, I no longer hold these stereotypes I had concerning the Africans-Americans though a few of my friends still hold some of them. There are so many reasons that led me to do away with the above stereotypes.

What happened that made me change my perception concerning the Africans-Americans

To start with, since the media it is the one that had made us develop these stereotypes by portraying Africans as the best art performers such as singers, dancers and great athletes, I did away with some beliefs I held about them. In addition, some televisions and films presented them as very kind and honest people and since these qualities are mostly possessed by Christians, I stopped stereotyping them as un-Christians. Additionally, I have read so many interesting and inspiring books written by Africans-American.This show that they are very intelligent people. The most classic example is the case of Barrack Obama who is the current President of US. He is an African American who has managed to rise to power in the most powerful country in the world. This show that we are not different or superior to the Whites.What differentiates us is only skin colour and this does not contribute a lot to our attributes except when negative stereotypes are used and one believes them to be gospel true and start acting as stated by these stereotypes.

The purpose of this activity is to illustrate that we all have different perceptions and explore the reasons associated with this. This is very important since most individuals assume that all people view the world in the same way. This is due to the fact that these people who make these assumptions do not have a chance of comparing what they see with those of other individuals (Mosher 2).However, this kind of assumption is not accurate as discussed here. For example, we may have the same drawings but we view it differently.

During the discussion regarding our perception and feelings about different pieces of artwork, we were with three of my friends. These include Ann, Jane and John. Ann came from a united family full of love. Jane has so much interested in art though she was not performing while John was a young boy who was only 13 years old. On the provided artwork, we all perceived different things even though we viewed the same piece of artwork. For example, when we looked at the Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe painting done by Edourd Manet, Ann saw a family sat together either on an outing or just relaxing. On the other hand, John saw a baby that was put aside and felt sorry for the baby while I saw a group of people who are in the forest resting either after a long toil such as hunting. However, though some of us saw the same things when we continued with the discussion we realised they were not talking of the same things.

Our feelings concerning the art were also different. For example, on looking at the Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe painting some of us felt so bad and humiliated because of the nakedness of the people while some did not feel anything bad about this. To them, these people might have been brought up in a culture whose nakedness to them is not a big issue. In addition, our interests and likes were also different. For instance, one of my friends could not even like to see some of the artwork as they believed they were immoral and others could not even remove their eyes from them. However, even where we liked the same artwork, the reasons that we gave as to why we liked the particular piece of artwork was also different. The reason for this is that we perceived the paintings differently meaning that after looking at the same pictures our interpretation of the same were very different.

Factors that made us perceive the artwork differently

There are many reasons as to why we perceived the paintings differently though we were seeing the same things. Firstly, the process of perception does not only depend on sensation but also involve the mind interpreting what is sensed. With regard to mental work, we all have different genes that determine our intellectual Quotient.This explains why we had different perception of the paintings. Moreover, we were all brought up differently in different cultural backgrounds where to some of us some of the paintings were not found in our areas and other paintings we were told have different influence on us when we look at them.

The fact that we belonged to different races and ethnic groups that held different cultures also contributed towards our differences in perceiving similar things differently. Moreover, we were all going through different issues of life, for example some of us were experiencing separation and others unity in their families.This is why when it came to the second painting some of us could talk of a family that are on an outing while others felt so bad remembering what is happening in their families. Lastly, we were not of the same age since some of us were younger and others older.

Individual’s favourite and least favourite work

After looking at the provided piece of artwork with my friends Ann, Jane, John and I, we gave each person’s favourite and least favourite piece of artwork. My favourite piece of artwork was the Les Demoiselles d’Avignon painting by Pablo Picasso. This resulted from the fact that the artist used different colours and communicate many things using one painting.My least favourite was Rokeby Venus paintings done by Diego Velazguez because of seeing the naked people as I have been brought up knowing that nakedness is associated with immorality. On the other hand, John’s favourite artwork was La Fourchette photograph done by Andre Kertesz as he was young and liked eating so much and seeing the photograph could associate it with food. On the other hand, his least favourite was Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe painting done by Edourd Manet as he saw as if there is a baby who is left to sleep and nobody was concerned about it.

Ann who came from a family full of love and unity said that her favourite piece of work was Dejeiner Sur L’Herbe painting by Edourd Manet. The reason she gave was that after looking at the painting she associated it with a family that have gone for an outing together. On the other hand, her least favourite was Rokeby Venus painting that was done by Diego Velazguez since after seeing the naked people she remembered the way she was beaten when she was young the day she had removed her clothes and walked naked in the rain.Lastly,Jane favourite piece of artwork was Composition 2 in Red Blue and Yellow paintings done by Piet Mondrian as these were her favourite colours.However, the Unique Forms of Continuity in Space sculpture by Umburto Buccioni was her least favourite. This arose from the fact that after looking the sculpture she remembered the punishment she was given during an art lesson when she failed to make a good sculpture as she had been told by her teacher.

Perception of the artist based on these artworks

After analysing the artwork carefully, we gave different perceptions concerning the artists and later came to a conclusion that artists are talented people who can communicate many things using different pieces of artwork. In addition, we perceived artists as people who are very social and able to relate very well with people of different backgrounds and learn many things from them which they put in their artwork. Lastly, we associated artists with sharp minded people who are able to learn information very fast and put it into paintings.

Lessons I learnt about perception as a result of this activity

After engaging myself in the above activity, I learnt that perception is a continuous process which involves first sensing what surrounds us and then mind interpreting whatever we sense. As a result, we may all see the same things but our interpretation may be different. This is due to the fact that our level of Intelligent Quotient is different. In addition, we may have come from different backgrounds where we were exposed to different cultures and beliefs. Differences in ages also affect the way people perceive things.

After engaging in the two activities, the first one from stereotype to empathy and the second one on perception and art , it is my belief that perception goes hand in hand with sensation.In addition, perception involves mental work where people may sense the same things but interpret them differently leading to different perceptions. Perception is an important topic as it helps us to develop different ideas from the way people perceive things. However, perception can lead to stereotyping which can in turn lead to different kinds of discrimination such as race and gender discrimination. Therefore, understanding the concept of perception better could lead to avoiding stereotypes thus reducing instances of discrimination and result to a better world.

• Charles, Hurst. Social Inequality: Forms, Causes , and Consequences . 6. Boston: Pearson Education Incorporation, 2007.Print.
• Lindsay, Peter and Norman, Donald. Human Information Processing: An Introduction to Psychology . USA: Rational Island Publishers, 1977.Print.
• Mosher, Rachel. Model for Perception. Serendip.1998. Web.
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