Why do you do these two newspapers report on the same events in such different ways? There are many possible reasons. One particularly irrelevant topic to social psychologists is that of person perception, which is the study of how we perceive and explain other people's behavior. Could it be that the different focus of each newspaper was important due to the contrasting ways that people from different cultures tend to try to explain human behavior? Although mass killings alike, these are mercifully rare events, how we try to explain them illustrate many of the processes that we go through in trying to figure out the causes of more everyday behaviors to Why did my boss show to me today, why is my partner so quiet tonight? Why is that a couple arguing industry or why did I agree to go to that party?

Whenever we are curious about why people including ourselves, behave in the ways they do, we engage in action tivity that social psychologists or attribution what is the process of assigning causes to behaviors, so we are often in the business of trying to make sense out of people in their behavior. In that sense, we are all amateur social psychology. In some situations, we may need to figure people out quite quickly. Some of these people are not particularly significant to us, the unknown pedestrians we pass on the sidewalk, or the checkout clerk at the grocery, for instance. In these cases, our interactions might be on a fairly superficial level, we might just engage in a quick transaction, not our hand in passing, exchanged pleasantries or accomplish some relatively limited tasks with the person before we move on. In other cases, our initial impressions of others might be more important.

For example, if someone approached you in a deserted alleyway, do you need to be a has to recruit or is it safe for you to continue on your way, in this section will consider How we make sense of other people, including the initial, and often intuitive impressions that we rely on so heavily in our leader, more considered judgments, then we will turn to the process of causal attribution with a goal of understanding how we infer what other people are really like by observing their behaviors. Finally, but we'll consider how a curate we are in making our determinations about others. And we'll examine differences among us in our personal perception styles. When we are finished, you will have a better idea of how we make judgments about other people. And this insight may enable you to perceive others more accurately.