COMM2110 CH4 Notes PDF

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Chapter 4 lecture and textbook notes for Fall 2018 COMM-2110 with Nicolle Johnson....

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1 COMM-2110 Interpersonal Communication Chapter 4 Notes

Table of Contents CHAPTER 4 INTERPERSONAL PERCEPTION

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4.1 The Process of Perception Three Stages of the Perception Process

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Influences on Perceptual Accuracy Forming Perceptions Online

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4.2 Fundamental Forces in Interpersonal Perception Stereotyping Relies on Generalization

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The Primary Effect Governs First Impressions The Recency Effect Influences Impressions

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Our Perceptual Set Limits What We Perceive Positivity and Negativity Biases Affect Perception

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4.3 Explaining What We Perceive Explaining Behavior Through Attributions Common Attribution Errors Self-Serving Bias Fundamental Attribution Error Overattribution 4.4 Improving Your Perceptual Abilities Being Mindful of Your Perceptions Checking Your Perceptions Separate Interpretations from Facts

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Generate Alternative Perceptions Engage in Perception-Checking Behaviors

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Revise Your Perceptions as Necessary

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CHAPTER 4 INTERPERSONAL PERCEPTION 4.1 The Process of Perception Vocabulary ●

Avatar: A graphical representation of a user that online communicators construct.

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Interpersonal Perception: Apply the process of perception to people and relationships.

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Interpretation: The process of assigning meaning to information that has been selected for attention an organized.

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Organization: The process of categorizing information that has been selected for attention.

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Perception: The process of making meaning from the things we experience in our environment.

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Physiology: The study of the mechanical and biochemical ways in which our bodies work.

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Physiological States: Conditions that are temporary.

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Physiological Traits: Conditions that affect us on an ongoing basis.

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Selection: The process in which your mind and body help you choose certain stimuli to attend to.

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Social Role: A set of behaviors that are expected of someone in a particular social situation.

Three Stages of the Perception Process Selection ●

We don’t necessarily make conscious decisions about which stimuli to notice and which to ignore. Rather, three characteristics especially make a particular stimulus more likely to be selected for attention: 1. First, being unusual or unexpected makes a stimulus stand out. 2. Second, repetition, or how frequently you’re exposed to a stimulus, makes it stand out. 3. Third, the intensity of a stimulus affects how you take notice of it.

Organization ●

Helps you make sense of the information by revealing how it is similar to, and different from, and other things you know about.

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According to communication researcher Peter Andersen, we use four types of schema to classify information we notice about other people: 1. Physical constructs: Emphasize people’s appearance, causing us to notice objective characteristics such as height, age, ethnicity, and body shape, as well as subjective characteristics such as physical attractiveness. 2. Role constructs: Emphasize people’s social or professional position.

3 3. Interaction constructs: Emphasizes people’s behavior. 4. Psychological constructs: Emphasizes people's thoughts and feelings, causing us to perceive that a person is angry, self-assured, insecure, envious, or worried. ●

Perceptual schemas can also help us determine how other people are similar to and different from us. They help us organize sensory information in some meaningful way so that we can move forward with the process of perception.

Interpretation ●

To interpret a behavior, you pay attention to three factors: you experience with it, your knowledge of it, and the closeness of your relationship with the person.

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In the interpretation process, you are basically asking, “What does this behavior mean?”

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The process is nonlinear. The three stages often overlap. How we interpret a behavior depends on what we notice about it, but what we notice can also depend on the way we interpret it.

Influences on Perceptual Accuracy ●

Because we constantly make perceptions, you’d think we’d all be experts at it by now. In truth, perceptual mistakes are often easy to make. Three factors in particular influence the accuracy of our perceptions and can lead to errors: 1. Physiological States and Traits: Many aspects of our physiology influence the way we perceive the world, especially physiological states and physiological traits. Example of physiological states include feeling tired, which can alter our perception of time. Examples of physiological traits include our senses and our biological rhythm, or the cycle of daily changes we go through in body temperature, alertness, and mood. As levels of various hormones rise and fall throughout the day, our energy level and susceptibility to stress change as well. 2. Culture and Co-Culture : Cultural values and norms have many different effects on the way we communicate interpersonally. Culture influences our perceptions and interpretations of other people’s behaviors. 3. Social Roles: Each of us plays several social roles, and those roles can influence the accuracy of our perceptions. One example of a social role is gender roles, which affect a range of communication behaviors.

Forming Perceptions Online ●

Researchers found that physically attractive men were perceived to communicate in kinder, more intelligent, more confident, and more humorous ways, compared to their less-attractive counterparts. This finding illustrates how visual cues can affect people’s perceptions of what they read, which is important on the online dating context. Because users do no always describe themselves accurately in

4 their profiles, it is useful to be aware of how readers’ perceptions can be swayed by users’ attractiveness. ●

Although avatars are not “real people,” they represent people, so we become accustomed to perceiving them in many of the same ways we perceive people around us.

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Researchers Kristine Nowak and Christian Rauh had college students evaluate a series of avatars and report on their perceptions. They learned that: ○

Avatars should look human as possible. The human-looking avatars were perceived to be more credible and more attractive.

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Avatars should have a defined gender. Many avatars appear androgynous, but people prefer interacting with avatars that they perceive as clearly male or female rather than androgynous.

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Communicators prefer avatars that match themselves. When asked to select the avatar they would most prefer to use as their own, the research participants showed a strong preference for human-looking avatars that matched their own gender.

4.2 Fundamental Forces in Interpersonal Perception Vocabulary ●

Altercentric: The opposite of being egocentric. Focused on the perspective of another person instead of your own.

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Egocentric: Unable to take another person’s perspective.

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Negativity Bias: The tendency to weigh negative information more heavily than positive.

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Perceptual Set: A predisposition to perceive only what we want or expect to perceive.

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Positivity Bias: The tendency to focus heavily on a person’s positive attributes when forming a perception.

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Primary Effect: The tendency to emphasize the first impression over later impressions when forming a perception.

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Recency Effect: The most recent impression we have of someone is more powerful than our earlier impressions.

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Selective Memory Bias: Remembering information that supports our stereotypes but forgetting information that doesn’t.

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Stereotypes: Generalizations about a group or category of people that can have powerful influences on how we perceive people.

Notes

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Even though we rely a great deal on our perceptions, research shows that those perceptions are vulnerable to a number of biases, many of which operate outside our conscious awareness.

Stereotyping Relies on Generalization ●

Stereotyping is a three-part process: 1. First, we identify a group we believe another person belongs to. 2. Second, we recall some generalizations others often make about the people in that group. 3. Finally, we apply that generalization to the person.

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Stereotypes can lead to some inaccurate, even offensive, evaluations of other people. Stereotypes underestimate the differences among individuals in a group.

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Perceptions about an individual made on the basis of a stereotype are not always inaccurate.

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A more productive way of dealing with stereotypes involves two elements: awareness and communication. First, be aware of the stereotypical perceptions you make. Try to be aware of situations when you do so, however, and also try to remember that your perceptions may not be accurate. Second, instead of assuming that your perceptions of other people are correct, get to know them and let your perceptions be guided by what you learn about them as individuals. By communicating interpersonally, you can begin to discover how well other people fit or don’t fit the stereotypical perceptions you formed of them.

The Primary Effect Governs First Impressions ●

According to the primary effect principle, first impressions are critical because they set the tone for all future interactions. Our first impressions seem to stick in our mind more than our second, third, or fourth impressions do.

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Psychologist Solomon Asch found that a person described as “intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn, and envious” was evaluated more favorably than one described as “envious, stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and intelligent.”

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Asch’s study illustrates that the first information we learn about someone tends to have a stronger effect on how we perceive that person than information we receive later on.

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Although first impressions are powerful, they aren’t necessarily permanent.

The Recency Effect Influences Impressions ●

At first glance, it might seem as though the recency effect and the primary effect contradict each other. They both appear to be more important than any impressions that we form in between.

Our Perceptual Set Limits What We Perceive ●

Our perception of reality is influenced not only by what we see, but also by our biases, expectations, and our desires. Those elements can create a perceptual set. Our perceptual set also

6 influences how we make sense of people and circumstances. For example, our perceptual set regarding gender guides the way we perceive and interact with newborns ●

Our perceptual set also influences how we make sense of people and circumstances.

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To improve your perceptual abilities, you must check your subjective perceptions against objective facts.

Positivity and Negativity Biases Affect Perception ●

Sometimes our perceptions are influenced more by positive or negative information than by neutral information. According to the negativity bias, even one piece of negative information can taint your perception of someone you would otherwise like.

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Positivity biases and negativity biases are particularly influential for communication and satisfaction in long-term relationships, such as marriages. When they consider their relationship as a whole, satisfied couples tend to emphasize its positive characteristics, while dissatisfied couples tend to emphasize the negative characteristics.

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Being aware of the influence of culture and gender on perception can best help one to avoid negativity bias.

4.3 Explaining What We Perceive Vocabulary ●

Attribution: An explanation, the answer to a “why” question.

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Fundamental Attribution Error: The tendency to attribute other people’s behaviors to internal rather than external causes.

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Overattribution: In which we single out one or two obvious characteristics of a person and then attribute everything he or she does to those characteristics.

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Self-Serving Bias: Our tendency to attribute our successes to stable, internal causes while attributing our failures to unstable, external causes.

Explaining Behavior Through Attributions ●

When we experience behavior we don’t immediately understand, we usually try to make sense of it. We do so by formulating an attribution. Attributions for behavior vary along three important dimensions—locus, stability, and controllability. 1. Locus: Refers to where the cause of a behavior is “located,” whether within ourselves or outside ourselves. Some of our behaviors may have internal causes, which means they’re caused by a characteristic of ourselves. Other behaviors have external causes, meaning they’re caused by something outside ourselves.

7 2. Stability: A second dimension is whether the cause of a behavior is stable or unstable. A stable cause is one that is permanent, semi-permanent, or at least not easily changed. 3. Controllability: Causes for behavior also vary in how controllable they are. If you make a controllable attribution for someone’s behavior, then you believe that the cause of that behavior was under the person's control. Common Attribution Errors Self-Serving Bias ●

Primarily deals with attributions that we make for our own behaviors. Research shows that we often extend that tendency to other important people in our lives. In happy relationships, people tend to attribute their partner’s positive behaviors to internal causes and negative behaviors to external causes. In distressed relationships, the reverse is often true. The self-serving bias is a natural, self-protective tendency, although it is a form of self-delusion.

Fundamental Attribution Error ●

As interpersonal communicators, we should bear in mind that people’s behaviors—including our own—are often responses to external forces.

Overattribution ●

Overattribution can contribute to problematic behavior in some contexts. Psychologists William Schweinle, William Ickes, and Ira Bernstein have studied overattribution in the context of marital aggression. When women communicate in a certain way, men sometimes explain the behavior as being typical of women in general. It was found that the more men engage in this form of overattribution, the more likely they are to be verbally abusive with their own wives.

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Overattribution happens a lot to marginalized groups.

4.4 Improving Your Perceptual Abilities Vocabulary ●

Direct Perception Checking: Involves simply asking other people if your perception of a situation is accurate.

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Indirect Perception Checking: Involves listening and observing in order to seek additional information about the situation.

Being Mindful of Your Perceptions ●

Know Yourself: The reason several people can observe the same even and form different perceptions of it is because of how our individual characteristics shape the way we perceive people and situations.

8 Focus on Others’ Characteristics: The Influence of Gender and Culture: Being mindful of our

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perceptions also means acknowledging how they are influenced by characteristics of the people we’re perceiving. Several studies have shown that people are more likely to perceive harassment when the supervisor is male as opposed to female. Culture has a strong influence on how we behave and communicate, and it influences the way we perceive behavior. When we observe interactions between people from other cultures, we are more likely to misinterpret their behaviors. Consider the Context: The last step in being mindful of your perceptions is to consider how the

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context itself influenced them. Checking Your Perceptions ●

After you have considered which factors led you to form a particular perception, the next step is to check the accuracy of that perception.

Separate Interpretations from Facts Describing what you actually saw or heard is not the same thing as interpreting it. If we are to check

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the accuracy of our perceptions, we must start by separating what we heard or saw from the interpretation we assigned it. Generate Alternative Perceptions ●

The practice of this is important for two reasons. First, it requires you to look at information about the situation that doesn’t match your original perception. Second, it encourages you to ask yourself what information you don’t have that might be relevant.

Engage in Perception-Checking Behaviors ●

Direct perception checking involves three elements: 1. Acknowledging the behavior you witness 2. Interpreting that behavior 3. Asking whether your interpretation was correct

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Neither direct nor indirect perception checking will provide foolproof results every time.

Revise Your Perceptions as Necessary ●

Good communicators use what they learn from perception checking to modify their perceptions of a situation. Sometimes you’ll find that your perceptions were accurate from the start. At other times, you’ll realize that they were not accurate, for any of the reasons we’ve considers: (1) They were limited by characteristics of yourself, of the people involved, or of the situation; (2) you were confusing facts and interpretations; or (3) you didn't consider any alternative perceptions....