13 ways to understand social perception

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I do not know which to prefer,/ The beauty of inflections/ Or the beauty of innuendoes,/ The blackbird whistling/ Or just after.

The fifth stanza of Wallace Steven’s poem “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is by far my favorite. I love the way it invokes that moment right after the blackbird song rings through the air, like the smell of rain in the air after the storm or the feeling of a kiss that remains on our lips long after our lover parts. The power of those moments is in that resonant reflection. It is born from the ability of humans to render sense out of fragments from our senses. This more than a century-old poem gained its renown for the way it brought attention to the multiplicity of perception — that even something as common as a blackbird could generate a myriad of ways to perceive its existence.

There are more than 8 billion people living on planet Earth at this moment. That means there are more than 8 billion different ways this planet is being perceived. Our inputs may be the same — sight, sound, smell, touch and taste — but the way that each of us interprets those inputs is shaped by our varied lived experiences. One may view that blackbird’s song with joy, a reminder of idle summers in the countryside. Another may view that song as a threat, a reminder of the time a blackbird’s droppings landed on their shoulder. Each perception is valid and valuable for that individual.

Much like a mesmerizing murmuration, humans often come together in groups in the hope of achieving synchronicity. This is as true in a hospital or office as it is in a dance performance. An organization builds a team around a mission and asks that the team members work together to achieve the goals embedded in that mission. Understanding how to perceive others — their own responses to your actions and their thoughts about others,  otherwise known as social perception — is a component of the social and emotional intelligence power skill . And it’s a crucial one  to master for the success of an organization’s mission  and your career.

What is social perception?

John Fleming, Ph.D., defines social perception as “the cognitive processes through which individuals interpret, organize, and recall information about others, impacting their understanding and predictions of social behavior.” Let’s break down what the lead people scientist (coolest title ever, by the way) at Culture Amp, experts in organizational culture, is telling us here.

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Social perception is a framework through which all humans think. It encompasses almost all the information processing about the people with whom we interact. Social perception is crucial to navigating our interactions with others, both currently and in the future. It is what helps us understand that shift in a friend’s expression when our gentle rhetorical jabs are about to result in hurt feelings if we don’t let up and to remember that expression shift in the future. Social perception is what helps us realize that when our mom says, “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed,” her tone of voice indicates she’s also probably mad, and it reminds us not to dye our sibling's hair green.

In the workplace, social perception helps us determine if a colleague is really listening to us or just feigning interest and how much to share with them accordingly. It helps us intuit that our direct report has something they want to bring up in a meeting but is too nervous to be assertive in that setting and to work to pivot conversations to them in the next meeting. Social perception is what allows the 70% of communication that a person transmits nonverbally to be incorporated into our understanding of the 30% they are communicating to us verbally. “It’s fine,” said with smooth contentment and a lilt in the voice can feel sweet like caramel. “It's fine,” said with terse resignment and a downward vocal slant can feel cold like a glacier. The ability to perceive the difference between those two different readings of the same two words is crucial to our success in relationships at work and at home.      

What are some common social perception errors?

Being that the heart of social perception is, well, perception, it is impossible to separate our interpretation of people’s actions from our own mental landscape. This isn’t anything to beat yourself up over. We live in the world, not in a vacuum. Unless one has memory issues, we bring our pasts, presents and hoped-for futures to interactions with others. That is inherent in leveraging social perception in a workplace or home. If your goal is to improve your social perception skills, you’ve got to level your internal playing field and pay attention to some of the common cognitive biases. Here are 13 (#YSWIDT) of the most common cognitive biases that impact our social perception in the workplace.

1. Fundamental attribution error. This means over-attributing others’ behavior to personality while ignoring context. For example, concluding that someone is unreliable only because they missed one deadline.
2. Self-serving bias. This is when we take credit for success but blame external factors for failure. For example, thinking you closed the deal because you’re a great salesperson but thinking you lost the deal because of negative pressures in the market.
3. Confirmation bias. This is when we seek and interpret information that confirms existing beliefs and ignores contradictory evidence. Say, for example, the entire cable news industry.
4. Stereotyping. This is when we assign characteristics based on group membership. For example, the way that us left-handed people think of right-handed people as cruel and petty for their effort to design the world’s store entrances in their favor, with the left of a double door entrance almost always locked, making us lefties look like idiots when we naturally grab for that door.
5. Halo effect. This is when we allow one positive trait to influence our overall perception. For example, when we assume a colleague is telling the truth because they are speaking confidently.
6. Horn effect. This is when we allow one negative trait to influence our overall perception. For example, when we assume a colleague is not telling the truth because they are speaking hesitantly.
7. Selective perception. This is when we filter information based on expectations or beliefs. For example, the experiences that my grandfather, dad and I bring to the start of the baseball season as lifelong  Chicago Cubs fans.
8. Projection bias. This is when we assume others share our values, motives or preferences. For example, when we think that everyone in our profession considers it a “calling” because that is the way we feel, when some may participate in it with only a steady income in mind.
9. Similarity (affinity) bias. This is when we favor people who are similar to us  For example, how I naturally like someone better when I find out that they are left-handed.
10. In-group bias. This is when we favor members of our own group over others. For example, the way we trust those from our own generation because we share cultural touchstones versus those from other generations with whom we don’t share those same touchstones.
11. First impression bias (primacy effect).This is when we allow early impressions to dominate our later judgment. For example, when we continue to fund or work on a project/product long after feedback has indicated that it is not working.
12. Contrast effect. This is when we evaluate someone relative to others instead of using objective standards. For example, when we attribute a strong performance to an average performer only because their peers look weaker. This, for some reason, brings to mind my decades of being a Chicago Bears fan.
13. Conformity bias (groupthink): This is when we align perceptions with the group rather than independent judgment. For example, when we silence that little voice in our head that tells us that the emperor's new clothes are, in fact, exquisite, and it isn’t just an old dude walking around in the nude.   

Now tell the truth: were you nodding your head in recognition reading through these common cognitive errors that impact our social perception? Any really hit home (I’m looking at you New York Mets fans)? This is good! These are common errors because “[we’re] only human/ Of flesh and blood [we’re] made.” Now that you know that these are common pitfalls when it comes to your social perception skills, you can begin to correct them.

How can I improve my social perception?

For some, adeptness with social perception comes easily. They know how to “read” people and are able to adjust adroitly to their future interactions with those same people. For others, this aspect of social and emotional intelligence is a struggle. They don’t seem to “pick up” on the fact that a coworker is taking advantage of them without any reciprocity.

There also are some people who have to actively work to improve their social perception because of how their brains work. For instance, there is a lot of social perception-related research looking at this issue through the lens of people with autism. Neurodiverse team members might have to proactively put in more effort to properly perceive, interpret and generate responses to the intentions, dispositions and behaviors of others, as a group of researchers describe it in their paper “Social cognition remediation interventions: A systematic mapping review.” Their research concludes that social perception can be improved through structured social cognition interventions that focus primarily on emotion processing/recognition and attribution-related processes.

To improve your ability to process and recognize others’ emotions, you first need to start with yourself. As Alice Boyes, Ph.D., describes in her 2019 Psychology Today article “3 Ways to Increase Your Emotion Skills,” we often experience our emotions in complex combinations. Very rarely are we simply happy, sad or angry.  Boyes recommends that, "Whenever you identify your emotions, identify at least two different emotions you're feeling, like ‘I feel nervous and excited.’ Aim to identify qualitatively different emotions rather than just variations on the same emotion. Variations or grades of the same basic emotion would be, for example, irritated and annoyed.”

So, the next time you are “in your feelings,” figure out how to describe those feelings with specificity. Your ability to better observe the granularity of emotions within yourself will make it easier for you to observe that granularity in others.

An additional approach to improving your social perception is to work on better reading people’s facial expressions. As we human animals evolved in group settings, the ability to detect the minute variations of facial expressions, sometimes called micro-expressions, was tantamountto our survival (here’s a great deep dive on micro-expressions). In the 2025 Time magazine article “How to Read Facial Expressions, and Why We Get Them Wrong,” Vanessa Van Edwards, author of Captivate: The Science of Succeeding with People, suggests the uncomfortable but effective, self-audit. This is where one looks at a recording of themselves from, for example, a virtual meeting to determine what messages about your emotions  your face was sending to others on the call. If you’re feeling especially brave, you could ask colleagues for feedback on what emotions they think your face was sending. How does your audit of your facial expressions and your colleague’s audit line up? Van Edwards also recommends “eye gazing,” focusing on other people’s eyes, rather than their mouths, when they are communicating. The mouth can obscure emotions a lot more easily than the eyes can.   

When it comes to improving your attribution-related processing, the authors of the 2015 Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science article “Perspective Taking Reduces the Fundamental Attribution Error” find that “adopting another person’s viewpoint may be a way to reduce the fundamental attribution errors” or the overlooking of contextual information and attributing behavior to internal  dispositions:for example, perceiving other people as angry and confused because we currently are. Perspective-taking asks us to adopt another person’s viewpoint to anticipate beliefs, desires, emotions and intentions. This is the proverbial “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.”

Being able to acknowledge, accept and make an effort to acclimate yourself to a colleague's lived experience will go a long way to better perceiving their actions in the workplace. How much could we all gain if we spent more time perspective-taking with the medley of lived experiences of the people that make up our families and workplaces and our cities, states and countries across the globe? The next time you are in a disagreement with someone at work, take a minute and perform some perspective-taking before you make a decision about what to do next.

Why is social perception so important at this moment?

The river is moving./ The blackbird must be flying. 

Verse 12 of Steven’s poem reminds us that the world is ever-changing. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus reminds us that no one ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and they are not the same person. Change washes over us all, whether it brings fresh water to our feet or acts as the air current onto which our wings of personal growth take flight. The people around us navigate the winds of change at the same time we do, though they may be on different paths, starting at different points or equipped with a different set of feathers.

We have but precious few moments in our lives, and most of them are spent in the company of others, whether at home, at work, at places of worship or places of entertainment. We can choose to spend those valuable moments focused inward, with a selfish desire to obtain from others only what we want, ignoring the impact our personal actions have on those around us. Or we can choose to spend those valuable moments focused outward, with a selfish desire to better perceive the lived experiences of those around us, to highlight the impact that our collective actions have on all those we serve. Be brave, and choose that outward focus, especially in this time of strife and mistrust. Act as though our lives depend on it. Because they do. And take flight in your efforts to better perceive the lives of others.