Person Perception and Interpersonal Behavior: Edited by Renato Tagiuri and Luigi Petrullo. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1958. 390 pp.

Resulting from a symposium at Harvard University in March 1957, this volume makes available much of the past decade's work and thought in that area of psychology which is described alternately as interpersonal, social, or person perception. The contributors represent several areas of psychology and the social sciences, but they address themselves primarily to an audience of social psychologists.

The phenomenological and operational approach to the processes of interpersonal perception and communication is apparently being pursued with great zeal. However, as one contributor points out, 'the recent epidemic enthusiasm for empirical explorations of these processes' has resulted in 'a rash of results which are interesting, statistically significant, and exasperatingly inconsistent'. Another writes that, when an operational definition 'can be combined with an "objective" procedure yielding a numerical score, the temptation

Of the twenty-three papers in this book, only two—a pioneering essay by Fritz Heider and another by R. B. MacLeod—have pre-to gather data is virtually irresistible'.