The resurgence of interest in observational skills and in the generality or specificity of those skills is credited to recent research on individual differences in abilities to decode nonverbal messages. The issues involved in identifying general and specific factors of accuracy are traced to developments in earlier research on observation and to events that shaped contemporary negativism toward observers. An experiment on observational generality, across two different observational settings and three types of observational cues illustrates how easily either bias — toward generality or specificity of skills — can be demonstrated.