[2] People learn about others' feelings and emotions by picking up information they gather from physical appearance, verbal, and nonverbal communication.
Facial expressions, tone of voice, hand gestures, and body position or movement are a few examples of ways people communicate without words.
[3] To fully understand the impact of personal or situational attributions, social perceivers must integrate all available information into a unified impression.
Most importantly, social perception is shaped by an individual's current motivations, emotions, and cognitive load capacity.
[citation needed] The processes of social perception begin with observing persons, situations, and behaviors to gather evidence that supports an initial impression.
Although society tries to train people not to judge others based on their physical traits, as social perceivers, we cannot help but be influenced by others' hair, skin color, height, weight, style of clothes, pitch in voice, etc., when making a first impression.
The ability to anticipate the outcomes of a situation is also greatly influenced by an individual's cultural background because this inevitably shapes the types of experiences.
Greatly influenced by Charles Darwin's research on facial expressions and book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), it is believed that all humans, regardless of culture or race, encode and decode the six "primary" emotions, (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust), universally in the same way.
[1] Other nonverbal cues such as: body language, eye contact, and vocal intonations can affect social perception by allowing for thin-slicing.
Thin-slicing describes the ability to make quick judgements from finding consistencies in events based only on narrow frames of experience.
With the observations drawn from persons, situations, and behavior, the next step is to make inferences that identify an individual's inner dispositions.
Psychological research on attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in 1958, and was subsequently developed by others such as Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner.
[1] According to Edward Jones and Keith Davis's correspondent inference theory, people learn about other individuals from behavior that is chosen freely, that is not anticipated, and that results in a small number of favorable outcomes.
[1] There are three factors that people use as a basis for their inferences: According to American social psychologist Harold Kelley, individuals make attributions by utilizing the covariation principle.
[1] Unless a snap judgement is made from observing persons, situations, or behavior, people integrate the dispositions to form impressions.
The theory states that impressions are made from the perceiver's personal dispositions and a weighted average of the target individual's characteristics.
Priming is the tendency for recently perceived or implemented concepts or words to come to mind easily and influence the understanding of the new information.
After making and integrating attributions, individuals form impressions that are subject to confirmation biases and the threat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Empirical research suggests that social perception is mostly accurate, but the degree of accuracy is based on four major moderator variables.
The test is composed of scenes, or vignettes, and those being assessed are asked to identify the emotions, feelings, beliefs, intentions, and meanings of the interactions.
Performance on TASIT is affected by information processing speed, working memory, new learning and executive functioning, but the uniquely social material that comprises the stimuli for TASIT provides useful insights into the particular difficulties people with clinical conditions experience when interpreting complex social phenomena.