Person Perception

Topic Introduction:
Person perception is about the information we gather when we meet another
person. This comes under social cognition, which explores how we process
information from our surroundings and its impact on our actions.
There are mainly two categories of person perception:
Indirect person perception: Observers watch what people do, and they make
judgments about others based on those observations. 
Direct person perception: Observers make categorical judgments about other
people based on attributes like sex, race, and age.
This project in hand will focus on the Direct Person Perception.

Approach:
To test the theories of person perception, the following the methods will be
used:
1. Social Experiment
2. Literature Analysis
3. Video Analysis

Implementation:
1. Social Experiment

Idea: The idea is to reconfirm the biases that people form about others
based on certain attributes such as physical appearance, dressing styles,
gender, colour etc.

Method: The team will prepare a set of questions which can be asked to
people to test how they process information about people they don’t
know. For instance, a question would be put forward about who they
think is a better student and they’ll have to chose from two of the team’s
volunteers who will be dressed differently. Approximately 10 such
questions would be asked to 20 different people so see if there is a trend
to support the perception biases.
 Target sample: The people targeted for this would be students from
VNIT and the locals from Nagpur.

2. Literature Analysis

Idea: This module of the experiment will take into account the perception
made based on the social status and demeanour of a person.

Target piece: The piece chosen is “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen.

Method: The character sketch of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy will be studied

and analysed.
He is perceived to be an arrogant man who is proud of his wealth because
of his reserved nature but later, the character confesses to be a shy and
reclusive person who finds it difficult to make new friends.

3. Video Analysis

Idea: The idea is to analyse perceptions based on habits.

Target Piece: The piece chosen is Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List”.
Method: The character of Oskar Schindler is shown to be very outgoing,
womanizing and war profiteer kind of a person. He’s perceived due to his
character traits and an insincere person but at the end he turns out to be
the unlikely war hero and saviour of aver 1000 Jews.

Inferences:
An application based study of the Direct Person Perception and reconfirmation
of the theories by examples from various fields.