Interpersonal perception is an area of research in

social psychology Social psychology is the methodical study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Although studying many of the same substantive topics as its counterpart in the field ...

which examines the beliefs that interacting people have about each other. This area differs from social cognition and person perception by being interpersonal rather than intrapersonal, and thus requiring the interaction of at least two actual people. There are three stages of the perception process including selection, organization, and interpretation.

Phenomena studied

*accuracy – the correctness of A's beliefs about B *self-other agreement – whether A's beliefs about B matches B's beliefs about themself *similarity – whether A's and B's beliefs match *

projection Projection or projections may refer to: Physics * Projection (physics), the action/process of light, heat, or sound reflecting from a surface to another in a different direction * The display of images by a projector Optics, graphics, and carto ...

/assumed similarity – whether A's beliefs about B match A's beliefs about themself *reciprocity – the similarity of A's and B's beliefs about each other *meta-accuracy – whether A knows how others see them *assumed projection – whether A thinks others see them as they see them These variables cannot be assessed in studies that ask people to form beliefs about fictitious targets.

Research

Although interest in this area has grown rapidly with the publication of

Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm Timothy Gladwell (born 3 September 1963) is a Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for ''The New Yorker'' since 1996. He has published eight books. He is also the host of the podcast ''Revisionist ...

's 2005 book ''Blink'' and Nalini Ambady's "thin-slices" research, the discipline is still very young, having only been formally defined by David Kenny in 1994. The sparsity of research, in particular on the accuracy of first-impressions, means that social psychologists know a lot about what people think about others, but far less about whether they are right. Many attribute this to a criticism that

Lee Cronbach Lee Joseph Cronbach (April 22, 1916 – October 1, 2001) was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to psychological testing and measurement. At the University of Illinois, Urbana, Cronbach produced many of his works: the " ...

wrote in 1955 about how impression accuracy was calculated, which resulted in a 30-year hiatus in research. During that time, psychologists focused on consensus (whether A and B agree in their beliefs about C) rather than accuracy, although Kenny has argued that consensus is neither necessary nor sufficient for accuracy. Today, the use of

correlation In statistics, correlation or dependence is any statistical relationship, whether causal or not, between two random variables or bivariate data. Although in the broadest sense, "correlation" may indicate any type of association, in statistics ...

s instead of discrepancy scores to measure accuracy and the development of the Big Five model of personality have overcome Cronbach's criticisms and led to a wave of new research . People more accurately perceive

extraversion Extraversion and introversion are a central trait dimension in human personality theory. The terms were introduced into psychology by Carl Jung, though both the popular understanding and current psychological usage are not the same as Jung's ...

and

conscientiousness Conscientiousness is the personality trait of being responsible, :wikt:careful, careful, or :wikt:diligent, diligent. Conscientiousness implies a desire to do a task well, and to take obligations to others seriously. Conscientious people tend to ...

in strangers than they do the other personality domains. A 5-second interaction tells you as much as 15 minutes on these domains, and video tells you more than audio alone. Viewing peoples' personal websites or "online profiles" (as on

MySpace Myspace (formerly stylized as MySpace, currently myspace; and sometimes my␣, with an elongated Whitespace character#Substitute images, open box symbol) is a social networking service based in the United States. Launched on August 1, 2003, it w ...

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

, or a dating website) can make people as knowledgeable about their conscientiousness and

open-mindedness Open-mindedness is receptiveness to new ideas. Open-mindedness relates to the way in which people approach the views and knowledge of others. Jason Baehr defines an open-minded person as one who "characteristically moves beyond or temporarily set ...

as their long-term friends. The question of whether social-networking sites lead to accurate first-impressions has inspired Sam Gosling of the University of Texas at Austin and David Evans formerly of Classmates.com to launch an ambitious project to measure the accuracy of first-impressions worldwide (YouJustGetMe.com).

References

External links

YouJustGetMe.com
, a project that attempts to measure the accuracy of first impressions {{Psychology *