The number, identity, meaning, and salience of ascriptive attributes in adult person perception

The multidimensional scaling of similarities data was employed in a study of person perception in five adult-aged groups of both male and female respondents. Stimulus persons were males and females of the same five ages. Regardless of the age or gender of the respondent group studied, an identical set of three basic attributes was identified: perceived age, perceived gender, and perceived autonomy. However, respondents also assigned different saliencies to these attributes and used them in quite different ways to categorize the stimulus persons. While the amount of between-group variability observed in these data is large enough to suggest that adult person perception is somewhat idiosyncratic in nature, it was still possible to discern several generalizable trends for the attributes of perceived age and perceived autonomy. These trends and several methodological issues are presented and discussed within the text of this article.