Social Perception and Social Reality

Lee Jussim is Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department at Rutgers University. He has published extensively on stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination, self-fulfilling prophecies and expectancy-confirming biases, and accuracy in social perception. He fully embraces scientific data, even when that data yields unpopular or politically incorrect conclusions (many of which can be found in this book).

• Section I - Introduction: This Book, Basic Ideas, and the Early Research ; Chapter 1 - Introduction: How Might Social Beliefs Relate to Social Reality? ; Chapter 2 - Social Reality is Not Always What it Appears To Be: The Scientific Roots of Research on Interpersonal Expectancies ; Chapter 3 - The Once Raging and Still Smoldering Pygmalion Controversy ; Section II - The Awesome Power of Expectations to Create Reality and Distort Perceptions ; Chapter 4 - The Extraordinary Power of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies ; Chapter 5 - The Extraordinary Power of Expectancies to Bias Perception, Memory, and Information-Seeking ; Section III - The Less Than Awesome Power of Expectations to Create Reality and Distort Perceptions ; Chapter 6 - The Less Than Extraordinary Power of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Considerations Based on Common Sense, Daily Life, and a Critical Evaluation of the Early Classic Experiments ; Chapter 7 - You Better Change Your Expectations Because I Will Not Change (Much) to Fit Your Expectations: Self-Verification as a Limit to Self-Fulfilling Prophecies ; Chapter 8 - The Less Than Awesome Power of Expectations to Distort Information-Seeking ; Chapter 9 - The Less Than Awesome Power of Expectations to Bias Perception, Memory and Judgment ; Section IV - Accuracy: Controversies, Criticisms, Criteria, Components, and Cognitive Processes ; Chapter 10 - Accuracy: Historical, Political, and Conceptual Objections ; Chapter 11 - Accuracy: Criteria ; Chapter 12 - Accuracy: Components and Processes ; Section V - The Quest for the Powerful Self-Fulfilling Prophecy ; Chapter 13 - Teacher Expectations: Accuracy and the Quest for the Powerful Self-Fulfilling Prophecy ; Chapter 14 - Do Self-Fulfilling Prophecies Accumulate or Dissipate? ; Section VI - Stereotypes ; Chapter 15 - On the Pervasiveness and Logical Incoherence of Defining Stereotypes as Inaccurate ; Chapter 16 - What Constitutes Evidence of Stereotype Accuracy? ; Chapter 17 - Pervasive Stereotype Accuracy ; Chapter 18 - Stereotypes and Person Perception: Can Judging Individuals on the Basis of Stereotypes Ever Increase Accuracy? ; Chapter 19 - Stereotypes Have Been Stereotyped! ; Section VII - Conclusion ; Chapter 20 - Important, Interesting and Controversial Work on Accuracy, Bias, and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies that Did Not Fit Elsewhere ; Chapter 21 - The 90% Full Glass Contests the Scholarly Bias for Bias

This book is well organized and clearly written. It is a book that scholars in these areas will want to read... Students also could learn a great deal about the importance of attending to the details of classic and current studies from reading this book.