Social perception

Social perception is, in psychology and other cognitive sciences, that part of perception that allows people to understand the individuals and groups of their social world, and thus an element of social cognition.

It allows people to determine how others affect their personal lives. While social perceptions can be flawed, they help people to form impressions of others by making the necessary information available to assess what people are like. Missing information is filled in by using an implicit personality theory: if a person is observed to have one particular trait, observers tend to assume that he or she has other traits related to this observed one. These assumptions help to "categorize" people and then infer additional facts and predict behavior.

Social perceptions are also interlinked with self-perceptions. Both are influenced by self-motives. Society has the desire to achieve beneficial outcomes for the self and to maintain a positive self-image, both for personal psychic benefits and because we know that others are perceiving us as well. It is human nature to want to create a good impression on others, almost as if self-perceptions are others' social perceptions.

Structural and functional factors

David Krech and Richard S. Crutchfield distinguish two major determinants of perception; structural factors and functional factors.

Structural factors

Structural factors are those factors driving solely from the nature of the physical stimuli and the natural effects they evoke in the nervous system of the individual. Thus, for the Gestalt psychologist, perceptual organizations are determined primarily by the psychological events occurring in the nervous system of the individual in direct reaction to the stimulation by the physical objects. Sensory factors are independent of the perceiving individual’s needs and personality.

Functional factors

Functional factors of perceptual organization derive primarily from an individual's needs, moods, past experience, and memory. All functional factors in perception are social, in the usual sense of the term. In one experiment, for example, Levine, Chein, and Murphy presented a series of ambiguous drawings to hungry college students and found a marked tendency for them to perceive the drawings as food objects, such as sandwiches, salads, roasts etc. There was no such effect when they showed the same drawings to students who had just finished eating. The different perceptions of the hungry and not-hungry students could not be due to "structural" factors, since the same pictures were presented to both groups, but could be due only to the differences in need or motivation of the members of the two groups.

While quantitative laws of how these functional factors actually operate in perception are lacking, a great deal of experimental work is available that demonstrates their pervasive influence in perception.

Interrelationship between structural and functional factors

The interaction that is true for most psychological processes is also characteristic of the operation of structural and functional factors in perception. Neither set operates alone and every perception involves both kinds of factors. Although we can experiment with structural factors alone in perception or with functional factors alone, we must realize that this is done only for experimental convenience. It means that whatever perception is being observed is a function of both sets of factors.

It is important to recognize the relationship between these two sets of factors because it is at this point that a reconciliation can be made between the behavioral psychologists who tend to break behavior down into its component parts and the gestalt psychologists who seek to understand man as an indivisible entity.

See also

• Interpersonal perception
• Joint attention