This document discusses several perceptual processes that can influence how people perceive others. It describes implicit personality theory, where one's beliefs about personality can lead them to perceive qualities in others that conform to their theory, even if inaccurate. It also discusses self-fulfilling prophecy, where predicting a belief can cause that belief to become true if the prediction is acted upon. Additionally, it discusses primacy-recency effect, where initial impressions tend to have greater influence over perceptions than later impressions. Finally, it outlines risks of stereotyping, attribution biases, and other fixed perceptions that can ignore individual complexities and lead to inaccurate understandings of people.

1. PERCEPTION

2. PERCEPTION
 Process by which you become aware of the many
stimuli impinging on your senses
 Five stages
 Stimulation
 Organization
 Interpretation-evaluation
 Memory
 Recall

3. PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES
 Implicit [hidden] personality theory
 Theory on personality that influence how you
perceive other people
 Beware
 Can lead you to perceive qualities in someone that your
personality theory tells you should present when they are
not
 Can lead you to ignore or distort characteristics in
someone that do not conform to your personality theory

4. PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES
 Self-fulfilling prophecy [forecast]
 Occurs when you make prediction or formulate a
belief that comes true because you made the
prediction and acted as if it were true
 Beware
 Can lead you to influence another’s behavior to conform
to your prophecy
 Can lead you to see what you predicted rather than what
really is

5. PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES
 Primary-Recency
The relative influence of stimuli as a result of
their order
 Primary – what occurs first exerts greater influence
 Recency – what occurs last exerts greater influence
 Beware
 Can lead to formulate a total picture of someone on the
basis of initials impression that may not be accurate
 Discount/distort later perceptions to avoid disrupting
initial impressions

6. PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES
 Stereotyping
 A fixed impression of a group of people that ignores
their individual, unique characteristics
 Beware
 Can lead you to perceive someone as having group
characteristics only and fail to appreciate the
multifaceted nature of people and groups
 Can lead you to ignore unique characteristics of an
individual and fail to benefit the special contribution
each has

7. PERCEPTUAL PROCESSES
 Attribution [acknowledgement]
The process by which you try to explain the
motivation for a person’s behavior
 Beware
 Can lead you to the self-serving bias: you evaluate your
own behaviors and take credit for the positive and deny
responsibility for the negative
 Can lead you to over-attribution: single out one or two
obvious characteristics of a person and attribute
everything that person does to these characteristics
 Can lead you to the fundamental attribution error: you
conclude that people do what they do because they do
because that’s the kind of people they are and not
because of the situation they are in