Blackwell Reference Online

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The term “social perception” might seem a misnomer, as it refers less to how people perceive their social environment through their senses than to how they make a judgment. Unlike the color of a car or the loudness of a piece of music, both of which can be more or less directly perceived by the respective sensory systems, the trustworthiness of a person or the aggressiveness of a social exchange can only be inferred or construed from various indirect cues. People have to go beyond the information given in order to arrive at a social judgment. In this sense, social perception is an active and constructive process of the perceiver. Not surprisingly, then, the same social situation or the same person may be “perceived” quite differently by different perceivers, or by the same perceiver in different situational contexts. Nevertheless, a theoretical framework that was originally suggested for visual perception, Brunswick's lens model (1947) , provides a quite suitable approach to social perception. This model suggests that objects have certain “real” properties (distal stimuli; e.g., shyness), which translate into certain cues (proximal stimuli; e.g., little eye contact). Only the cues, not the “real” thing, can be directly perceived by an observer. Cues are retranslated and inferences from different cues are then put together to form a picture. Proximal cues can differ dramatically ... log in or subscribe to read full text