The Relative Importance of Verbal and Visual Information in Indirect Person Perception
Peter B. Warr, Chris Knapper · British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology · 1966
It is argued that many cases of person perception are indirect, in that they are mediated by information provided by other persons. Several examples of indirect perception mediated by newspaper communications were examined in two experiments. In the first experiment the results of adding different types of visual information to a standard news item were investigated, and it is shown that the addition of a photograph to a verbal description can significantly alter subjects' perceptions of a stimulus person. In the second experiment a more sophisticated technique for comparing the perceptions generated by verbal and visual information was used. Verbal information was found to be of greater importance than visual material. Methods are discussed whereby the information transmitted by different communications can be assessed. These are based on the notion that information content is inversely related to predictability, which can be measured by correlational procedures.