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After reading this article you will learn about the differences in person perception.
Sex Differences:
Research investigations have indicated that there are differences between boys and girls in person perception. It has been shown that girls tend to describe adult figures in a less differentiated manner and also in a more favourable light compared to boys.
Boys tend to lay emphasis on aggressiveness, non-conformity etc., while girls have been shown to be inclined to emphasize nurturance, physical appearance and social behaviour. Women on the whole have been shown to rely more on stereotyping, be less analytical, more intuitive and more concerned with psychological attributes than men. Women interestingly appear to depend more on visual cues compared to men.
Individual Differences:
Besides basic and general issues in person perception, there is enough evidence to show that there are considerable degrees of individual differences, depending on a number of factors. Thus personal cognitive styles appear to affect person perception as much as perception of non-social stimulus.
Styles like the style of integration, analytic versus global orientations, which are perceiver characteristics do play a role. Similarly the conception or belief we have about human nature and even personality traits have also been found to be influential. Some concentrate on external and physical traits while others look for internal characteristics.
Then there are some who emphasise more on stimulus characteristics and others on situational characteristics. Thus personal characteristics including one’s mental sets, response sets and related conditions can influence person perception. But the relationship between perceiver’s characteristics and the degree of accuracy appears to be very varying and complex. In view of this it becomes very difficult to predict who is likely to be a better and accurate judge and who is not.
Perhaps, there is more similarity between person perception and object perception than we thought. Many leading psychologists like Taguiri are of the view that the recent trend of studying person perception not in isolation but as part of psychological processes is most welcome.