In social psychology, social salience is the extent to which a particular target draws the attention of an observer or group. The target may be a physical object or a person. If the target is a person, they may be alone or a member of a group (of which the observer may also be a part) or else in a situation of interpersonal communication. It is based on the way a particular feature can be linked to a certain type of speaker, who is then associated with social and emotional evaluations. These evaluations are then transferred to the linguistic feature. An observer's attention may be drawn to a target as a result of certain general features of that target. These features include: General object attributes – vivid colors, object's proximity to observer Difference between object attribute and its immediate environment. Difference between observer's expectations of an object and the observable attributes of that object. Observer's goal – an object that matches goal-oriented searching. Social salience allows for observers to quickly detect changes in their environment. Given the limited cognitive capacity of humans, this is advantageous but can lead to biases and misperceptions as in the case of the representativeness heuristic. Awareness of this heuristic does not always completely mitigate its effect. Social salience is also distinguished from cognitive salience in the sense that it consists of the variation along with attitudes, cultural stereotypes, and social values associated with it. In addition, the variation has already been used to carry social indexation. On the other hand, cognitive salience pertains to the objective property of linguistic variation that allows language users to pick up on it. Social salience of objects While there are colors and patterns that are objectively more vivid, salience is a function of the difference between the target object and its environment, or "ground". The greater the difference between the target and the ground, the stronger the social salience of that target. In the case of social salience, this distinction is characterized as a comparison between the attributes of the target and the attributes of other items in the target's proximal ground. Other items in the target's proximal ground set the norm for attributes an observer can expect. When an object’s attributes violate those pre-set expectations, it is socially salient. The strength of an object's social salience may also be underscored when it is the target of a goal-oriented