Observation is a significant influence on how individuals perceive other people around them. Therefore, perception is selective and will differ from one person to another. The way people perceive things is linked with their inherent characteristics, and it is possible for two people to observe one subject and have different perceptions about the same. The paper, therefore, sought to identify the socio-psychological attitudes aimed at a person’s image assessment and the primary effect impact on the attitude of an individual. The study involved 100 1-4-year undergraduate and 1-2-year graduate students from the Faculty of Psychology of the local university. 88 participants were selected for the second stage of the experiment (44 males, 44 females). The respondents’ age was from between 19-22 years (N = 88, M = 21, SD = 1.5). Questionnaires were administered to the respondents to elicit answers, which were analyzed and informed the conclusions. The study concluded that primary influences perception and it is visible in observation. It was concluded that observation is a purposeful, organized, long-term perception. Expression is also important, in how a person perceives another. The voice of a person also had the same effect on the perception of an individual.
Abstract
Observation is a significant influence on how individuals perceive other people around them. Therefore, perception is selective, and will differ from one person to another. The way people perceive things is linked with their inherent characteristics, and it is possible for two people to observe one subject and have different perceptions about the same. The paper, therefore, sought to identify the socio-psychological attitudes aimed at person’s image assessment and the primary effect impact on the attitude of an individual. The study involved 100 1-4-year undergraduate and 1–2-year graduate students from the Faculty of Psychology of the local university. 88 participants were selected for the second stage of the experiment (44 males, 44 females). The respondents’ age was from between 19-22 years (N = 88, M = 21, SD = 1.5). Questionnaires were administered to the respondents to elicit answers, which were analyzed and informed the conclusions. The study concluded that primary influences perception and it is visible in observation. It was concluded that observation is a purposeful, organized, long-term perception. Expression is also important, in how a person perceives another. The voice of a person also had the same effect on the perception of an individual.
Keywords: Primary effect, interpersonal perception, first impression biases, personal perception selectivity, perception interpretation, perception integrity
Primary Effect, Interpersonal Perception, and First Impression Biases
Introduction
Perception in communication theory is understood as the process of selection, organization, and interpretation of sensory data, or, in other words, the process of imparting meaning to sensually perceived information. In psychological science, it is customary to divide perception into objective and social perception (in social psychology, this is called social perception). In the context of interpersonal communication, we will be interested in social perception and, as its variety, interpersonal perception.
At the level of general psychological mechanisms, the primary effect in perception is the same cognitive process as the perception that occurs outside communication situations. Therefore, the same patterns apply to it: selectivity, integrity, constancy, and meaningfulness. However, there are differences regarding the content of the categories describing it (Fitzgerald et al., 2018). Special classes of objects - people, events, and holistic situations - are subjected to identification and categorization in interpersonal perception, and the interpretation of the perceived content is influenced by the individual’s attitudes, interests, and intentions.
Literature Review
Personal Perception Selectivity
The vital regularity of perception is its selectivity. Studying selectivity, researchers have come to understand that perception begins with the selection of meaningful data for the further construction of a subjective image. In each specific situation, a person pays attention to only a relatively small part of the influences but simultaneously creates a limited but coherent and meaningful picture of the world. The selectivity of human perception is due to the meaning and significance of the objects around it, interests, and all previous human experiences. Physiologically, the selectivity of perception is explained by the dominance of one focus of excitation in the cerebral cortex in the presence of simultaneous inhibition of other parts of the cortex (for example, the state of love, jealousy, envy). So, a pregnant woman often notices other pregnant women, and even a man whose wife is preparing to become a mother also suddenly notices this feature of the body in other women.
Perception Integrity
The integrity of perception is manifested in the fact that people perceive objects and situations not discretely but as a dynamic whole, spontaneously organize their images of perception into a meaningful form. In this case, spatial proximity and similarity principles apply, which can be demonstrated, for example, using optical illusions (Forgas, 2011). At the same time, the perception, including person by person, is inherent inconstancy - comparative stability even in changing conditions. Despite changes in illumination and distance from the observer, the image of the perceived person remains relatively constant.
In studies related to the perception of a person by a person, 15 universal scales were found: "unpleasant - pleasant", "dishonest - honest", "evil - good", "pessimistic - optimistic", "undemanding - demanding", "dependent - independent", "Funny - serious", "indecisive - decisive" (Qin et al., 2021). At the same time, evidence was experimentally obtained for the primary of semantic (verbal) coding of the characteristics of an object in comparison with sensory characteristics (that is, a thought, a word is primary). Perceptual work begins with an assessment of the semantic universality of the object. Semantic rather than sensory types of regulation are leading in the construction of a conscious image. Thanks to the development of the second signaling system, human perception is distinguished by meaningfulness. Perceiving an object, situation, person, or event, we include all the generalized knowledge that we have accumulated about this category of objects in the built image (Wiedenroth et al., 2020). The following final stage of perception is the interpretation of the perceived information. Interpretation in perception is the process of imparting meaning to the perceived information - building judgments, conclusions, assessments, conclusions.
Perception Interpretation
Interpretation in the process of perception is the critical moment of any communicative act. The whole point of the interaction of participants in interpersonal perception is that they build a particular system of conclusions and conclusions regarding each other and the situation, which is more connected with the processes of thinking, imagination in comparison with ordinary sensory perception (Rey et al., 2020). Researchers believe that interpretation is designed to eliminate the semantic ambiguity of the situation and reveal the meaning of what is happening in a practical sense. At this stage of cognition, hypotheses, guesses, versions of what is happening are put forward and tested, a new meaning is revealed due to the comparison and analysis of the data involved, contradictions are revealed. Own versions and opinions correlate with those of others.
The success of the interpretation process is enhanced by reflection, which links the evaluations and opinions made into a single construct with a person’s self-concept, values, and position. The self-concept reflects the general orientation of the personality: either egocentric when one’s point of reference and personal values prevail, or altruistic when universal human values prevail, the interests and needs of others are considered (Noguchi et al., 2014). Interpretation also depends on personality traits. It can be challenging for dogmatic and conservative people, straightforward, unambiguous, democratically oriented people with a flexible cognitive style - flexible, multi-tone, suitable for revision and new interpretations.
Thus, the perception of a person is another person’s image construction, recognition, and interpretation. It unfolds through direct interaction with him, focusing on the features of his appearance, behavioral reactions, and communicative actions (Fang et al., 2018). At the same time, it is evident that perception as a process of selection, organization, and interpretation of sensory data in interpersonal communication becomes more complex and specific than simple subject perception. Special classes of objects of perception are subjected to categorization - people, events, and critical situations; interpretation is based on subjective life experience, using complex implicit theories.
Primary Effect
Closely related to the interpersonal perception mechanisms are the effects of primary and novelty. These effects relate to the order of presentation of information about a person to form a particular idea about him. The effect of primary is manifested in those cases when a stranger is perceived, and during its evaluation, the role of the installation is played by the information submitted earlier (Sullivan, 2019). At one time, several experiments were conducted to confirm the existence of this phenomenon. Thus, Solomon Ash invited the participants of the experiment to get acquainted with the presented descriptions and then evaluate the person who is depicted in them:
A. Steve is intelligent, hardworking, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and jealous.
B. Steve is jealous, stubborn, critical, impulsive, hardworking, and intelligent.
Both descriptions contain the same information about Steve, but there is first positive information in the first description, and the second - negative. Psychologists found that people who read description A have rated Steve more positively than those who had negative information at the beginning of the description (Fourakis & Cone, 2020). In the situation of perception of a familiar person, there may be an effect of novelty, the essence of which is that the latest, more recent information about the person becomes the most significant and, accordingly, can either strengthen the already stable attitude to the person or change it in the opposite direction.
Perception effects and stereotypes play a dual role in human communication. On the one hand, they reduce the time of getting to know other people and encounter people of different ages, genders, and professional and social backgrounds (Noguchi et al., 2014). On the other hand, stereotypes standardize the process of human communication, contribute to the formation of false knowledge about people, lead to errors in assessing the behavior and personality of another person, which negatively affects the whole process of communication and subsequent relationships between people. In this regard, the accuracy and adequacy of human perception are necessary conditions for the effectiveness of joint activities.
Primary effect and novelty affect people's perception through experience distortion. It enables the person to conclude the condition or intentions of another person using their own experience. Assuming that another person’s experience is to some extent like our own, we begin to understand them better. However, this same ability of ours - to project our state onto another - can lead to severe errors of perception, causing problems in mutual understanding (Qin et al., 2021). Such an error in the perception of another person, compared to an error in the perception of an object, is much more challenging to correct (you need to connect the processes of empathy, agreement, reflection, which require certain energy costs). In everyday communication, the perceiver most often does not set himself the task of clarifying or checking his idea, sincerely considering it true. And then there is a chain reaction - one mistake entails another, significantly influencing the subsequent nature of interpersonal relations.
Method
Participants
In the empirical part of the study, methodology for studying the socio-psychological attitudes of the personality in the primary effect experiment consists of two parts: Part 1 is aimed at identifying socio-psychological attitudes aimed at person's image assessment "appealing - not appealing," "neutral"; Part 2 - to identify primary effect impact on the attitude aimed at "positive-negative;" a sampling questionnaire aimed at finding out the dependency between people's perception of another person with and without traits knowledge. The study involved 100 subjects, 1–4 year undergraduate and 1–2-year graduate students of the Faculty of Psychology of the local university, of whom 88 subjects were selected for the second stage of the experiment (44 males, 44 females). The participants’ age varied from 19-22 years old (N = 88, M = 21, SD = 1.5).
Materials and Procedures
At the first stage of empirical research (preparatory), the subjects were interviewed to prepare stimulating research material. The subjects were asked the task: Choose five traits that make an individual look appealing and not appealing. Based on the results obtained, the most frequently selected traits were selected for further research. At the next stage of the study, the subjects were offered a questionnaire to determine their preferences in media for searching for new connections, friends, or media personas. Groups of subjects formed two equal groups (N=44), who use social media frequently (group A) and those who rarely use social media for new contacts (group B). Then, to identify differences in the subjects' attitudes, they were offered a methodology for studying the primary effect on a person's social profile assessment. Further, at the experimental stage of the study, the subjects were presented with social media profiles containing prosocial and individualistic contexts.
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- Rhoda Frank (Autor), 2023, Primary Effect, Interpersonal Perception, and First Impression Biases, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1363793
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