Social Psychology of Visual Perception

This volume takes a contemporary and novel look at how people see the world around them. We generally believe we see our surroundings and everything in them with complete accuracy. However, as the contributions to this volume argue, this assumption is wrong: people’s view of their world is cloudy at best.

Social Psychology of Visual Perception is a thorough examination of the nature and determinants of visual perception, which integrates work on social psychology and vision. It is the first broad-based volume to integrate specific sub-areas into the study of vision, including goals and wishes, sex and gender, emotions, culture, race, and age.

The volume tackles a range of engaging issues, such as what is happening in the brain when people look at attractive faces, or if the way our eyes move around influences how happy we are and could help us reduce stress. It reveals that sexual desire, our own sexual orientation, and our race affect what types of people capture our attention. It explores whether our brains and eyes work differently when we are scared or disgusted, or when we grow up in Asia rather than North America.

The multiple perspectives in the book will appeal to researchers and students in range of disciplines, including social psychology, cognition, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscience.

Emily Balcetis is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University. She received her Ph.D. in 2006 from Cornell University in Social and Personality Psychology. Her research provides a comprehensive examination of the pervasiveness of motivational biases in visual perception and decision-making, exploring both conscious and unconscious effects using a balance between traditional and high-tech, novel techniques, paradigms, and approaches.

G. Daniel Lassiter is Professor of Psychology at Ohio University. He received his Ph.D. in 1984 from the University of Virginia, completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University, and held a visiting position at the University of Florida before arriving at his present institution in 1987. For more than two decades, he has conducted research on the mechanisms underlying people’s perceptions of the behavior of others, including investigations of the consequences of variation in the behavior-perception process for social judgment and decision-making. During this period, he developed a theoretically driven program of scholarship aimed at examining the effect of presentation format on how mock jurors evaluate confession evidence, which was one of the earliest psychologically oriented research programs on this topic.