The contemporary concept of social perception is considered to be an umbrella term that includes various other traditional and related phenomena such as person perception, impression and attitude formation, social cognition, attribution, stereotypes, prejudice, social categorisation, and social comparison and implicit personality theories. This book presents research on social perspectives and behavioural responses which follow. These include child perceptions, social class issues, perceived attractiveness theories, occupational prestige and related communication factors.

This title contests the received wisdom in the field of social psychology that suggests that social perception and judgment are generally flawed, biased, and powerfully self-fulfilling.

This volume focuses on social perception, the processing of information about people. This issue has always been central to social psychology, but this book brings together literatures that in large part have been separated by the nature of the social target that is involved. Historically, research on person perception developed quite independently from research involving perceptions of groups. Whereas the former research generally focused on the cognitive processes involved in forming impressions of individuals, research on group perception examined the content of stereotypes and the conditions under which they are used in social judgment. There was been little overlap in the theories and methods of these subfields, and different researchers were central in each. The chapters in this book highlight research and theorizing about social perception, exploring the processes involved in social perception from persons to groups. Some chapters describe work that was originally developed in person perception but is being extended to understanding groups. Other chapters illustrate how some processes studied in the domain of stereotyping also affect perceptions of individual persons. Finally, other chapters focus on variables that affect perceptions and judgments of both individuals and groups, proving opportunities for greater recognition of the common set of factors that are central to all types of social perception. This groundbreaking book highlights the research contributions of David L. Hamilton, whose research has played a central role in uniting these previously independent areas of research. It provides essential reading for upper-level courses on social cognition or social perception and could also serve as an auxiliary text in courses on interpersonal perception/relations and courses on stereotyping/intergroup relations.

Navigating the social world requires sophisticated cognitive machinery that, although present quite early in crude forms, undergoes significant change across the lifespan. This book will be the first to report on evidence that has accumulated on an unprecedented scale, showing us what capacities for social cognition are present at birth and early in life, and how these capacities develop through learning in the first years of life. The volume will highlight what is known about the discoveries themselves but also what these discoveries imply about the nature of early social cognition and the methods that have allowed these discoveries -- what is known concerning the phylogeny and ontogeny of social cognition. To capture the full depth and breadth of the exciting work that is blossoming on this topic in a manner that is accessible and engaging, the editors invited 70 leading researchers to develop a short report of their work that would be written for a broad audience. The purpose of this format was for each piece to focus on a single core message: are babies aware of what is right and wrong, why do children have the same implicit intergroup preferences that adults do, what does language do to the building of category knowledge, and so on. The unique format and accessible writing style will be appealing to graduate students and researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and social psychology.

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The 9th book in the Ontario Symposium series.It highlights research on motivated social perception. The targeted market includes scholars, researchers, and advanced students interested in social perception.

The last 20 years have yielded an explosion of information from the still nascent field of social neuroscience. Studies devoted to identifying neural correlates of social cognitive and moral judgment processing have established subcortical and cortical regions that are integral for how we filter and interpret information pertinent to family and friends, our social in-group, and strangers and engage in everything from forming immediate impressions of them to judging their behavior with respect to complex moral norms. What is less clear is how neural regions involved in implicit and explicit cognitive processing, or those cognitive processes that occur almost instantaneously as opposed to those that are more controlled respectively, interact to bias perceptions and behavior. Even less is known about how genes (and their variants) critical for neural function and the structural integrity within neural regions may modulate neural interactions critical for social cognitive and moral judgment processing. Recent methodological advancements assessing how different neural regions functionally work together with others, and how different genetic variants integral for neural function alter behavior, are establishing a more comprehensive view of the implicit and explicit social brain. These advancements demonstrate that structures critical for implicit processing, e.g., the amygdala, reliably covary in their activity with structures integral for explicit processing, e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, early and often during the processing of social information of varying complexity and in different contexts. This suggests that interactions between these regions are necessary to successfully navigate and immediately adapt to one’s environment. In turn, genetic variants like those that comprise the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) gene, oxytocin receptor gene, or serotonin transporter gene likely play an important role in modulating the interaction between and within neural regions integral for interpersonal trust, intergroup processes, person perception, theory of mind (i.e., inferring the thoughts and feelings of others), and moral judgment processing. The purpose of this Research Topic is to further our understanding of how subcortical and cortical neural regions that vary in their functional contributions to social behavior also depend upon genetic influences in shaping individuals’ perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and how information is attended to and encoded to influence future social behaviors. It is particularly important to demonstrate how these regions reliably interact as a function of processing speed (i.e., implicit or explicit) and/or context to predict behavior or performance. Demonstrating how different genetic factors in turn moderate this interaction, or how genetic factors alter a specific region’s interaction with other regions, is equally important. We therefore solicit original empirical work, review and opinion papers, and methodological papers that can promote our understanding of how interactions between neural regions underlying implicit and explicit processes influence social cognitive and moral judgment processing and are, in turn, modulated by genetic predispositions. This includes work that utilizes fMRI, EEG and psychophysiological methodologies, lesion samples, as well as developmental and computational approaches. This Research Topic could serve as an important step in the evolution of our understanding of the complexity of the social mind as well as illuminate the robust effects context has on the way the brain interacts with different stimuli at every level of cognitive processing.

Over the past three decades mounting evidence has suggested that infants’ social perceptual and social cognitive abilities are considerably richer than was once thought. By the end of the second year of life, infants discriminate faces along various social dimensions, attend to and understand others’ goals and intentions, use the emotions of others to guide their learning and behavior, attribute dispositional characteristics to other agents, and make basic social evaluations. What has also become clear is that there is a great deal of variability in infants’ social perception and cognition. A critical, outstanding question concerns the nature and meaning of such variability. The proposed Research Topic welcomes papers addressing cutting-edge questions regarding variability and individual differences in early social perception and social cognition. The goal of these papers is to investigate overarching questions in this domain, which are necessary to move the field forward. Variability in early social perception and social cognition (among other domains) in infancy and early childhood is often attributed to noise, or overlooked in favor of focusing on age-related changes. Yet, recent work suggests that variability in social perceptual and social cognitive tasks reliably inter-relates, and predicts real-world social behaviors. For example, infants’ everyday experience with different face categories predicts individual differences in face processing, infants’ production of goal-directed actions predicts their simultaneous understanding of these actions, and variability in social attention during the second year of life is related to theory of mind during the preschool years. These findings suggest that variability in performance on social perception and social cognition tasks is not merely a nuisance variable, but, rather, may provide the key to addressing significant questions regarding the nature of infants’ social perception and social cognition, and the processes that underlie developmental change. Acknowledging and closely examining and investigating variability in early social perceptual and social cognitive abilities may represent a powerful approach for understanding development in (at least) two ways. First, variability can signal transitional points in the developmental onset of a given ability. Thus, such variability, and the extent to which variability relates to experience and/or other abilities, can be used to test hypotheses regarding mechanisms that underlie developmental changes. Second, variability can represent more enduring individual differences between infants. In this case, critical questions arise regarding the source of individual differences (that is, what factors shape the emergence of individual differences?) and whether such early individual differences contribute to the development of more advanced and sophisticated forms of social cognition and behavior. The goal of this Research Topic will be to encourage researchers to take variability in early social perception and cognition seriously. Papers that give variability center stage, and are aimed at addressing the value of variability for identifying developmental mechanisms, as well as investigating the existence, source, and antecedents of early individual differences in social perception and social cognition are welcomed. Taken together, the contributed papers will provide integral new information to the study of social perception and social cognition over the first three years of life.

The scientific study of the human body has burgeoned in recent years, and scholars from wide-ranging disciplines are now seeking to understand just how much information can be conveyed by the human body in motion. This volume sheds light on the potency of the human body to inform our most basic perceptions of one another.

Using a balanced approach, Social Psychology, 2e connects social psychology theories, research methods, and basic findings to real-world applications with a current-events emphasis. Coverage of culture and diversity is integrated into every chapter in addition to strong representation throughout of regionally relevant topics such as: Indigenous perspectives; environmental psychology and conservation; community psychology; gender identity; and attraction and close relationships (including same-sex marriage in different cultures, gendered behaviours when dating, and updated data on online dating), making this visually engaging textbook useful for all social psychology students.