ABSTRACT
Suppose you are lost on a busy street of a strange city or town you are visiting. If you are going to ask someone the way, you probably won't ask just anyone. You would probably choose someone who looks friendly, perhaps not too hurried, and who doesn't look lost. The fact that we make such judgments fairly easily shows that we can and do infer things about people on the basis of a very limited sample of behaviour. Our first impressions of strangers often determine whether or not we wish to meet them again. We make judgments about many different attributes of people, for example, whether or not they seem friendly, intelligent, anxious, aggressive, optimistic or even psychologically disturbed. We may even make quite a variety of judgments about a person op the basis of a few words of description given by an acquaintance.
