Summary: | During the past two decades, an extensive body of empirical evidence has accumulated in that area of social psychology labeled variously as social perception, empathy, or person perception. As the reviews by Bruner and Tagiuri (1954) and Taft (1955) indicate, the focus of attention in the early research was on the accuracy of one person's perception of the personality characteristics of another. Many such studies have centered on the accuracy of the guesses by one person of the way others responded to personality questionnaires. Summarizing his impressions of these investigations, Cronbach (1958) points out that the findings are "interesting, statistically significant, and exasperatingly inconsistent" (p. 353).
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