Interpersonal perception is an area of research in social psychology 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.
Although interest in this area has grown rapidly with the publication of Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 book Blink[2] and Nalini Ambady's "thin-slices" research, the discipline is still very young, having only been formally defined by David Kenny in 1994.
Many attribute this to a criticism that Lee Cronbach wrote in 1955 about how impression accuracy was calculated,[3] which resulted in a 30-year hiatus in research.
[4] Today, the use of correlations instead of discrepancy scores to measure accuracy[5] and the development of the Big Five model of personality have overcome Cronbach's criticisms and led to a wave of new research .