Research on people’s accuracy in perceiving other people’s states, traits, and social attributes has existed for over 100 years. In the past few decades, however, it has exploded into a vibrant, interdisciplinary, and international pursuit with relevance to all areas of social, interpersonal, and intrapersonal life. However, researchers typically work within narrowly defined traditions within the field. The present volume brings these areas together to describe method, theory, and findings for seven content domains (judging emotions, thoughts and feelings, truth versus lie, personality, social attributes, others’ views of self, and group attitudes). Correlates at the group, individual, and situational levels are discussed, as well as the basic question: how accurate are people in judging other people? The strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in this field are discussed, and directions for future research are offered.

The accurate recognition of facial expressions is important for social interaction and interpersonal relationships. Many psychiatric disorders are characterized by social difficulties, including problems in recognizing the emotions of others. The disorders of autism, schizophrenia, depression, social anxiety, and borderline personality disorder all involve difficulties in social cognition, which include deficits in recognizing emotions. However, the nature of these difficulties within and between psychiatric disorders is not well understood. One problem is that differences in the methodologies and samples utilized within emotion research often make it difficult to make comparisons across studies and disorders. Despite these differences, some commonalities in deficits for perceiving emotional expressions have been noted within psychopathology, which include differences in processing of emotions involving negative valence. This may suggest dysfunction of a primary emotion system centered on the amygdala in the brain, although the exact nature of this dysfunction may vary between some disorders.

Research on people’s accuracy in perceiving other people’s states, traits, and social attributes has existed for over 100 years. In the past few decades, however, it has exploded into a vibrant, interdisciplinary, and international pursuit with relevance to all areas of social, interpersonal, and intrapersonal life. However, researchers typically work within narrowly defined traditions within the field. The present volume brings these areas together to describe method, theory, and findings for seven content domains (judging emotions, thoughts and feelings, truth versus lie, personality, social attributes, others’ views of self, and group attitudes). Correlates at the group, individual, and situational levels are discussed, as well as the basic question: how accurate are people in judging other people? The strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in this field are discussed, and directions for future research are offered.

Over the past decades, there has been increased interest in and recognition of the importance of interpersonal accuracy (IPA) for successful social interaction. Yet, while there has been some success in creating instruments that assess individuals’ accuracy in inferring others’ personality, affect and emotions, thoughts and feelings, deception, and social affordances, there have been no systematic efforts to examine the degree of overlap between these measures. The relatively few attempts in which relationships have been reported have shown surprisingly low correlations. Here, we utilized meta-analytic techniques to map out how different assessments of IPA are related to each other and to evaluate the question whether there is a global IPA skill. The results revealed a modest but significant overall correlation that was moderated by domain and nonverbal channels available in each measure. Implications for a unified construct of IPA are discussed.

How accurate are people’s stereotypes about groups? And how accurate are people in knowing what others think of the groups they belong to? The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying accuracy in people’s attitudes about in-groups and out-groups, and to provide a brief review of empirical findings that address such accuracy. I focus on two central questions that scholars have addressed: One, are people accurate in their judgments about groups? And two, are people accurate in reading what others think about groups to which they belong (i.e., meta-perceptions of attitudes about groups)? I first discuss methodological and conceptual approaches to studying group-based attitudes, including a discussion of the process through which a valid truth criterion is selected, the different ways in which the relationship between the truth and the judgment can be operationalized, and the level at which accuracy is measured. I then review findings from research on accuracy of group-based attitudes using a motivation-based framework to understand why perceivers might be accurate or inaccurate in their judgments. Finally, I propose several avenues for future research, with an emphasis on research designed to provide evidence of the process through which perceivers become accurate and biased in their own attitudes about groups and their perceptions of others’ attitudes about groups.