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▼a In order to efficiently navigate our social world, humans sort one another along dimensions and categories intended to reflect the structure of human behavior. Following, social perception has predominately been theorized a fixed detection process to identify functionally and adaptively significant social attributes (e.g., warmth, competence, anger, race). However, decades of social perception research have revealed perceptions vary substantially along many lines. To account for this, I integrate advances in social and cognitive sciences, from which a new dynamic perspective of social perception emerges, where perceivers pass perceptual cues through fundamentally subjective conceptual maps of the world to form inferences. Specifically, I propose perceivers form conceptual structures of what social concepts exist in the world (e.g., frequent speakers are 'extroverted') and how they associate with one another (e.g., 'extroverted' people are often 'kind' and 'male'), then use this structure to make inferences (e.g., 'this kind male is likely extroverted'). In contrast to prior theory, this perspective explains how perceptions are bound to vary in their initial formation (which cues determine them), ease and automaticity (temporal dynamics), variance (within and between perceivers and contexts), and high level structure (categorical and dimensional structures). Importantly, this perspective integrates theory of social perception, bridging perceptual processes (e.g., emotion recognition, impression formation, and social categorization) and their contexts (e.g., face impressions, person knowledge, and group stereotyping).To provide a first and broad examination of this perspective, I examine how social perceptions (e.g., warmth, extroversion) correlate with one another along the lines of their conceptual associations (e.g., 'are warm people likely to be extroverted?'). In Chapter 1, we demonstrate that face-based trait impressions color one another in to the extent they are conceptually associated. Faces perceived to possess one personality trait (e.g., trustworthiness) elicited additional trait impressions (e.g., creativity) to the extent perceivers conceptually associate the traits (e.g. 'trustworthy people are often creative'). Chapter 2 extends the findings of Chapter 1 across domains of social cognition, where the same conceptual structuring of trait impressions emerged across the domains of face impressions, familiar person knowledge, and group stereotype content. Lastly, in Chapter 3 I apply this perspective to the processes of emotion recognition and social categorization. Survey, mouse-tracking, and neuroimaging analyses showed categories apparent in a face (e.g., 'male') facilitate or inhibit perceptions and neural representations of other categories (e.g., 'black') to in accordance with their conceptual association (e.g., 'male and black categories share stereotypes'). Together, these findings provide the foundation for a conceptual account of social perception, suggesting it is subjective and dynamic in nature, where the perceptions and dimensions which emerge are bound to perceivers' conceptual representations of the social world. |