How do people form impressions of others?

People spontaneously form impressions of unfamiliar others in everyday life, such as inferring how competent, kind, or energetic someone is. Understanding these general characteristics of others is helpful for encoding their chronic behavioral tendencies, which in turn guide our interactions with them. We are interested in a broad range of questions along this line of research including but not limited to:

• How do people take cues from complex information streams in the real world to form impressions of others?
• How do comprehensive social and physical contexts shape the impressions people form of others?
• How are various impressions we form of others organized and related to each other in the mind?
• How does impression formation interact with other social and cognitive processes (e.g., mental states, memory)?
• How do culture and language shape the way people form impressions of others?

How do impressions of others influence real-world outcomes?

Impressions of others' general characteristics inferred based on limited information such as physical appearances and a few instances of emotions or behaviors generally do not reflect the targets’ true characteristics. Instead, these thin-slicing judgments reflect the perceivers’ stereotypes and biases. We are interested in a broad range of questions along this line of research including but not limited to:

• How do thin-slicing impressions of others influence decision-making in the real world (e.g., politics, law, science)?
• How does forming impressions of other people influence information sharing and misinformation?
• How do our impressions of others influence our own mental states and mental well-being?
• How do we apply person perception theories to promote collective and prosocial behavior (e.g., climate actions)?
• How does the over-generalization of stereotypes to non-human objects (e.g., data viz) influence real-world behavior?