Amity Institute of Psychology & Allied Sciences

Module 3
Social Perception

Dr. Ashima Narula

Assistant Professor
AIPS, AUUP
 Amity Institute of Psychology & Allied Sciences

Forming Impressions of Others

How we form impression of people, what kind of information we use in arriving at
those impressions, how accurate our impressions are, and what biases affect our
impressions.

Six Principles of impression formation:

• People form impression of others quickly on the basis of minimal information & go
on to impute general traits to them.
• People pay special attention to most silent features of a person, rather than pay
attention to everything. We notice the qualities that make a distinctive or unusual.
 Amity Institute of Psychology & Allied Sciences

• Processing information about people involves perceiving some coherent meaning in

their behavior.

• We organize our perceptions by categorizing or grouping stimuli. Rather than see

each person as a separate individual, we tend to see people as members of groups.

• We use our enduring cognitive structures to make sense of people’s behavior.

• A perceiver’s own needs and personal goals influence how he or she perceive others.
 Amity Institute of Psychology & Allied Sciences

What Information do we use?

• Roles
• Physical Cues
• Salience (figure-ground principle: attention drawn to stimuli that stand out against a
background).
• From behavior to traits
• Central traits
• Categorization
 Amity Institute of Psychology & Allied Sciences

How do we combine all these separate inferences about a person into an overall
impression?

• Evaluation (the “goodness” or “badness” of another person, object or concept)

• Negativity effect
• Positivity bias
• Emotional Information
• Averaging principle (idea that evaluative information about a person is averaged
together to form an overall impression).
• Schemas
• Prototype (abstract ideal of the schemas)
• Exemplars
Amity Institute of Psychology & Allied Sciences