On Greeks and horses: impression formation with social and nonsocial objects

Brewer chose to present a model of impression formation that deemphasizes differences between perception of social and nonsocial objects. In particular she assumes that “… (1) in the majority of the time perception of social objects do not differ from nonsocial perception either in structure or process. (2) When it does differ, it is determined by the perceiver's purposes and processing goals, not by the characteristics of the target of perception.” (p. 4). Her model further postulates (cf. Fig. 1.1) that processing can take one of two routes following identification: either top-down (i.e., categorical processing) or bottom-up (i.e., personalistic processing).