Abstract
The present study reexamined the influences of the perceiver and perceived on the person perception process. A conceptual replication of Touhey's laboratory study of the influences of directed attention on the perception process was conducted with several methodological refinements. Subjects viewed a videotape of two men performing anagram tasks under either person-centered or task-centered viewing instructions. They subsequently described the men on a bipolar description procedure and responded to a questionnaire aimed at validating the instructional manipulation. Results indicated that subjects' attention was meaningfully manipulated by the instructions. Moreover, the person-centered group applied more distinctions to the targets, agreed with each other more in the selection of distinction dimensions, but less in the application of polar terms of the dimensions, and discriminated between targets to a greater degree than the task-centered group. The overall pattern of results appears to grossly replicate Touhey's findings.
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