People perception: Social vision of groups and consequences for organizing and interacting

Abstract

An enormous amount of research on person perception exists. This literature documents how people form impressions of one another and how these impressions influence behavior. However, this literature surprisingly has not been extended to people perception—how people visually perceive and judge groups (e.g., teams, classrooms, boards, crowds) rather than individuals. We propose a model of people perception processes, including three stages of Selection, Extraction, and Application (the SEA model). We integrate this model with literature from organizational, social, cognitive, and visual sciences to describe the important role of people perception in organizational and social behavior. We focus our discussion on organizational and social phenomena such as group tone, group hierarchy, and group evaluation.