Person perception is of great importance in everyday life and human
science. Judgment of other people's characteristics and intentions is
important for suc- cessfully planning actions within a social
environment. Questions about the formation of impressions and causal
attributions are central to social psychology and the study of
diagnostic judgment formation. The field of per- son perception deals
with questions of how impression formation proceeds, what
characteristics and intentions are attributed to other people, and how
preformed schemata and stereotypes influence people's first impressions.
Research on person perception developed rapidly after the Second World
War. In the 1950s the precision and accuracy of person perception
received special interest, but the problems concerning whether an
individual's assessment of another personality is exact or not could not
be solved. Another approach, which began in the 1940s and was derived
from the Gestalt psychological tradi- tion, dealt with impression
formation based on selected social cues. This ap- proach, which proved
to be very useful, had considerable influence on both the research
methods and the theoretical orientation of the research work. On the one
hand, by using a combination of individual cues (like physical
characteris- tics) researchers tried to ascertain how an impression of a
person was formed. On the other hand, the Gestalt psychological
orientation led to an interest in the process of person perception,
which in the last 10 years has concentrated on questions concerning
information reception and processing.