Personal approach: An empirical construct and some findings 1

In perceiving or attempting to understand another person, our efforts are complicated by the fact that the object of otir perceptions is not a simple "object" at all, but is rather himself a perceiver with a perspectival orientation of his own within which he, most likely, is attempting to construct understandings —also his own. An understanding of another person may give more or less salience to this feature of the other's existence. It may accord more or less importance to the other's unique frame of reference in his personal world; in terms used in this report, the construction may vary along a dimension from personal to impersonal approach. The processes by which interpersonal constructions or perceptions are formed have received the attention of a considerable nimiber of researchers (see Tagiuri, 1969 for a recent summary). The studies reported here differ from recent dominant trends in that work in two main ways: a free description mode of response is sampled, and the writer's perspective (personal or impersonal) is the dimension of focus. Most recent research in person perception has focussed on various determinants (stimulus cues, interpersonal contexts, etc.) of perceptions, with the latter being measured by having subjects check a scale ranking the other on some provided trait or attributional dimension. This strategy has the advantage of ready quantifiability, but it also has the disadvantages, as pointed out by Peevers and Secord (1973), of artificially restrictive sampling of concepts and a loss of the concept's personal usage and degree