PERSON PERCEPTION AND SOCIAL ILLUSIONS. THEORETICAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS

Abstract

The process of social perception may be disrupted by a series of errors of perception that have both theoretical and practical relevance. The study proposes a survey of the way in which a person is perceived based on his/her status and position in society, as well as on the identification of the participants’ attitudes towards a person with a high social position by contrast with a person with a low social position. The main research methods used are: the experiment, the questionnaire, the observation and statistical techniques. The sampling group comprises 100 participants, being established by simple random sampling and complies with the standards of representativeness for the research objectives. Research findings confirm that a person’s status distorts perception and a person’s perceptions are determined, in certain contexts, by the stereotypes that guide interpersonal evaluation. Moreover, more than half of the research participants manifest the tendency of placing the characters in a previously known category. The impressions presented in this study are accordant with past experience, sensorial representations and evaluative judgments.