ABSTRACT
Snap judgments of people from brief glances pervade our social worlds, andthe social-psychological literature is replete with evidence showing thatvisual information provided by people’s faces drives many of these perceptions. The fact that we form impressions on the basis of facial cues is clear. However, knowing why and how we do so is a more complex issue. A variety of mechanisms have been offered to account for appearance-based impressions (Ambady & Skowronski, 2008; Brewer, 1988; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Rhodes & Zebrowitz, 2002). The present chapter shows how an ecological approach to person perception has contributed to our understanding of the role of facial cues in impression formation (Montepare & Zebrowitz, 1998; Zebrowitz & Montepare, 2006). Moreover, it provides an example of how social science coupled with visual science can generate new insights about person perception. Unlike more traditional social-psychological models, the ecological approach draws on Gibson’s theory of object perception (Gibson, 1979) and calls attention to directly perceptible stimulus information revealed by facial cues that drives the perception of social-behavioral traits. In addition to discussing the distinguishing tenets of the ecological approach to person perception, this chapter describes how accurate innate or prepared responses to age-and emotion-related facial cues produce other far-reaching and biased perceptions of people. To this end, the age-and emotion-overgeneralization effects and their consequences are presented along with a discussion about how perceivers’ attunements and aspects of stimulus information shape social impressions.1
