P Graduate Sch Stanford

Many tendencies in social perceivers' judgments about individuals and groups can be integrated in terms of the premise that perceivers rely on implicit theories of agency acquired from cultural traditions. Whereas, American culture primarily conceptualizes agency as a property of individual persons, other cultures conceptualize agency primarily in terms of collectives such as groups or non-human actors such as deities or fate. Cultural conceptions of agency exist in public forms (discourses, texts, and institutions) and private forms (perceiver's knowledge structures), and more prominent the public representations of a specific conception in a society, the more chronically accessible it will be in perceiver's minds. We review evidence for these claims by contrasting North American and Chinese cultures. From this integrative model of social perception as mediated by agency conceptions, we draw insights for research on implicit theories and research on culture. What implicit theory research gains is a better grasp on the content, origins, and variation of the knowledge structures central to social perception. What cultural psychology gains is middle-range model of the mechanism underlying cultural influence on dispositional attribution, which yields precise predictions about the domain-specificity and dynamics of cultural differences. More than just an occasional modern pastime, people watching is an essential, primordial human activity. As social animals, people depend on the social perception abilities that allow them to navigate their social environments. Yet learning who to avoid, who to trust, and so forth, requires more than simply registering others' observable actions; it requires inferring underlying characteristics, enduring dispositions, from which future actions can be predicted. Psychologists have long contended that perceivers go beyond the observable data with inferences guided by theory-like knowledge structures (Bruner, 1957; Heider, 1958). This " theory theory " of social perception is rooted in the metaphor that lay social perceivers are like scientists, guided by theories in the questions they ask and the answers they construct when interpreting ambiguous data. Proposals about the content of the implicit theories guiding social perception have ranged, " theories of action " (Heider, 1958) and " theories of mind " (Wellman, 1990) being among the most influential. These proposals have been successful in accounting for particular inferences that perceivers make about persons, yet they do not capture how perceivers make parallel inferences about other kinds of perceived actors, such as groups or nonhuman supernatural entities. An integrated model of social perception across cultures requires a more encompassing account …