Active perception is one of the cornerstones of James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology and has important implications for our understanding of social perception. Ecological psychology is broad and divided on many issues, but it’s generally based on three essential ideas.

First, we understand the world, including the people, objects, and places in it, through interaction. We experiment with unknown aspects of the environment around us and make sense of them through active engagement. For example, infants will put unusual objects in their mouths to explore the qualities of the object with their more refined sense of taste, rather than through their underdeveloped senses of sight and touch. This approach also holds true for later world exploration and interpersonal interactions (with more selective sense use, of course; it is often impolite to taste new people). The point is, our accurate understanding of the world is gained through our interaction with it, and limited interactions will generate less information and therefore less accurate perceptions.

Second, due to the nature of our active perception, sense-making is largely inseparable from behaviour. We make sense of the world to interact with it. We see objects, people, and places as opportunities or constraints for behaviour. Behaviour creates opportunities for more sense-making, which creates opportunities for new behaviours. In other words, sense-making is an activity that requires skilled action. As we act with the world, we better understand it.

Third, perception is neither subjective (entirely a creation of the mind) nor objective (a direct representation of the physical world), but something in between. A set of stairs is not seen as a set of stairs if it does not have the objective physical property of being a series of ascending step-height platforms. In the same way, individualised perceptions of the world mean that we do not perceive just any ascending platforms—say, buildings of different heights in a cityscape—as stairs. This applies more broadly to person perception, too. A smile is not simply an objective configuration of facial muscles. It is most often perceived as a signal of recognition, positivity, or affection. In this example, the perception that “They are smiling” or “They are happy” takes priority over “They are showing me their teeth.”

Perceiving People

Combined, these ecological concepts give rise to a dynamic, reciprocal, and contextual model of perception that can explain social knowing. Active perception lets us as perceivers consider how both members of an interaction create information through their actions, body language, conversation content, tone of voice, spatial positioning, and countless other features of social presentation. In the ecological sense, social knowledge is created by both the perceiver and the behaviour generated by the person being perceived.

In the first impressions literature, we find that perceivers are generally good at recognising personality traits, such as how energetic another person is, on the first interaction. Work by myself and other psychologists has shown that more energetic people gesture more, talk more quickly, and move faster. Their disposition is present in a wide variety of behaviours that we observe on a daily basis. Other types of information, such a person’s orderliness, are generally less present on a first interaction. That’s why we find it harder to accurately judge overall orderliness on a first exchange; that information simply isn’t available without a situation that enables the behaviour to emerge. However, if a first encounter involves an organisational task, then an individual’s behaviour would help generate an accurate first impression of orderliness. In other words, recognising the psychological qualities of another person is in part dependent on the environment of interaction. We don’t simply “mind-read.” We observe behaviours that we often help create.

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This article first appeared in issue 1 of The Side View Journal. Purchase your own copy here. 

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First dates and job interviews are other examples of when we use social interaction to generate more information about a person of interest. In these cases, people will create opportunities for information in an interaction partner using questions in conversation, non-verbal behaviour (e.g., smiling), and proxemics (e.g., moving towards or away from someone). In this ecological understanding of engagement, behaviour is not clearly separable from perception. Watching dialogue is a great example of this. Asking questions, touching someone’s arm, or moving towards the other person invites a behavioural response (or an equally informative lack of response) that refines our understanding of that person.

Perceiving Errors

Even though first impressions are generally accurate, we should not underestimate the consequences of mistaken perception. Consider the many problems caused by errors in person perception. Prejudice and wrongful stereotyping of various forms are caused by the erroneous use of information we receive from others. The exact same behaviour, generating the same objective information, can be perceived differently by two different people. A simple example of this dynamic is your perception of a person wearing a sports team uniform. Your perception of this person is based on your support, opposition, or indifference to that sports team. The same objective information provides a different basis of understanding for your own perception.

From a mutualist, dynamic understanding of perception, it makes sense that superficial encounters are prone to errors because in those cases there has been no opportunity for further exploration. There has been no chance for individuals to create opportunities for the relevant behaviours to emerge. In fact, the biggest concern with prejudice is the denial of the opportunity to generate more information to refine your perception. If you avoid interacting with people from an “out-group,” you are less likely to refine and update your understanding of those people as individuals. From an ecological perspective, prejudice is a denial of opportunity. It is a robust finding in social psychology that contact with other cultures is related to increased acceptance of out-groups. Exposure to others, and generating shared social information with them, allows us to recognise and refine the gaps in our perception.

Digital Interactions

Digital interactions also highlight issues with disrupting dynamic interaction. For example, the frustration a person feels when talking to someone over the internet, especially when there’s a lag due to buffering or other technical issues, is arguably driven by the expectancy of engaging with a world that will react to us appropriately. In 2018, the ambiguous “yanny/laurel” audio clip became an internet phenomenon and a great example of this issue. The audio clip of a voice saying the same word was heard by some listeners as “yanny” and by others as “laurel.” The clip was the same each time, with the same quantifiable sound wave properties. The ambiguity came from the lack of information provided to the listener.

As an ecological psychologist, this moment was interesting to me as the uncertainty of the sound was driven by the forced position of the listener as a passive receiver of the voice. The listener was not able to interact with the source of the noise. In an everyday situation, if a speaker’s message is unclear, you would be able to probe back with questions for better understanding such as, “Sorry, could you repeat that?” The yanny/laurel illusion works because our understanding is compromised by our detachment from active perception. When we’re limited in our ability to get more information from other people, we make errors.

A Naturalistic Science of First Impressions

I want to highlight one last issue to close the essay. Psychological research on the topic of first impressions, body language, and self-presentation is still quite far from accurately informing our everyday life. In the 1980s, leading psychologist Ulric Neisser looked at the field of person perception psychology and said, “The theories and experiments described . . . all refer to an essentially passive onlooker, who sees someone do something.” The participant in these research projects “doesn’t do anything—doesn’t mix it up with the folks he’s watching, never tests his judgments in action or interaction.” Neisser is commenting on how removed from its everyday context the academic idea of first impressions had become. I think his comments largely stand today.

We psychologists will often study the effect of face shape (i.e., the width to height ratio) or colour or symmetry by asking people to make judgments of a cropped face alone. Or we may ask participants to listen to an isolated audio clip. These are very limited attempts to study the whole person as they appear to us in everyday life. These approaches grow out of a reductionist approach to psychological research, an approach seen as the gold standard for understanding perception. This approach asks questions like, “Could face colouring have an effect if all else is held equal?”, rather than, “What effect does face colouring have when meeting a new person?” The field of person perception is changing, and many of us are working towards more holistic and naturalistic presentations of people. Unfortunately, the vast majority of person perception research is still done in the abstract. We have findings that tell us about perceptions of tall people or people with brown hair, but we cannot extrapolate to perceptions of tall people with brown hair. Let alone a myriad of other person features.

In addition, under the name of experimental control, we rarely allow our participants to dynamically engage with the people presented in our studies. Given that we make sense through dynamic engagement with a complicated and noisy world, person perception psychology has a way to go before we can explain a first impression. We know that interpersonal understanding is generated through “mixing it up with folks.” This much is essential. But we do not yet understand the mechanisms and natures of such a process. With modern technology, this is an exciting time for the future of psychology, one that offers many more opportunities to dynamize our science. I hope we continue to move towards an interactive, naturalistic, and mutualist approach to understanding person perception.