The next two summaries will discuss how we go beyond our initial perceptions of people to form inferences about them. Social inference refers to the processes we use to identify, sample and combine information to form impressions and make judgements. Firstly, a few examples of factors that affect the accuracy of social inferences. These are factors that affect the first stage of social inference, selecting information to use in our social judgements.
Salience means information that stands out and attracts the observer's attention.
So for example, people are often afraid of air travel because the idea of an air crash is very salient and vivid. In fact the statistics show that air travel is many times safer than car travel, but statistics are much less salient than vivid TV news pictures of blazing plane crashes. This means easy to bring to mind. One factor that makes particular information easy to bring to mind is if you have just thought about it recently. The priming studies we discussed earlier demonstrate that bringing a category to mind makes it likely we will use that category in subsequent judgements.