ABSTRACT
The perception of human action is core to social psychology, yet over theyears it has not received nearly the scientific study lavished on post-perception, cognitive operations (e.g., the selective retrieval of information from memory). It is not surprising, then, that prevailing accounts of a variety of social psychological phenomena (e.g., the effect of prior expectations on evaluations) inevitably emphasize cognitive or inferential mechanisms over perceptual mechanisms. Is it the case that perceptual accounts of many social psychological phenomena are not feasible, or is it the case, perhaps, that the cognitive framework has so dominated the field that few investigators have even sought to seriously explore the question of their tenability? The research highlighted in this chapter will show beyond all doubt that the former conclusion at least is decidedly incorrect. In keeping with the overall theme of this volume, the work to be described focuses on various top-down factors that alter how people initially perceive the actions of others (and in some instances, on the downstream consequences directly associated with these alteration in perception). Most of the studies discussed herein employed the behavior unitization paradigm first introduced by Newtson (1973). As such, it is necessary to begin with an overview of the unitization paradigm and an examination of some of the seminal findings it produced.
