Accuracy in social perception: contributions of facial and vocal information

The validity of social perceptions was assessed on the basis of facial or vocal information. Specifi-cally, impressions ofstimulus persons ' power and warmth were obtained on the basis of either a facial photograph or a voice recording. These were compared with the stimulus persons ' elf-re-ports along the same dimensions. Face- and voice-based impressions did predict self-view. The specific facial and vocal characteristics that mediated these links were also considered. Potential mechanisms that may yield the match between self-perceptions and impressions based on nonver-bal cues are discussed. As people navigate their way through their social environ-ment, a wealth of information is continually made available to them. During the past two decades, research in the area of person perception has mainly been focused on describing the kinds of errors that people are inclined to make whdn process-ing social information, as well as elucidating the causal mecha-nisms that yield those biases. In the rush to identify the condi-tions under which people may be wrong, however, psycholo-gists seem to have forgotten that social perceivers also do, at least on occasion, manage to get things right. In fact, some researchers have suggested that when allowed to function in an environment more naturalistic than that characteristic of the typical person perception experiment, social perceivers are much more competent than the literature would lead one t