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The Relative Importance of Verbal and Visual Information in Indirect Person Perception
Author(s) -
WARR PETER B.,
KNAPPER CHRIS
Publication year - 1966
Publication title -
british journal of social and clinical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.479
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8260
pISSN - 0007-1293
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8260.1966.tb00964.x
Subject(s) - perception , psychology , predictability , cognitive psychology , stimulus (psychology) , visual perception , social psychology , nonverbal communication , communication , statistics , mathematics , neuroscience
It is argued that many cases of person perception are indirect, in that they are mediated by information provided by other persons. Several examples of indirect perception mediated by newspaper communications were examined in two experiments. In the first experiment the results of adding different types of visual information to a standard news item were investigated, and it is shown that the addition of a photograph to a verbal description can significantly alter subjects' perceptions of a stimulus person. In the second experiment a more sophisticated technique for comparing the perceptions generated by verbal and visual information was used. Verbal information was found to be of greater importance than visual material. Methods are discussed whereby the information transmitted by different communications can be assessed. These are based on the notion that information content is inversely related to predictability, which can be measured by correlational procedures.