chpt 4

Our Perceptual Set Limits What We Perceive

"I'll believe it when I see it," people often say. Our perception of reality is influenced not only by what we see, however, but also by our biases, our expectations, and our desires. These elements can create what psychologists call a perceptual set, or a predisposition to perceive only what we want or expect to perceive.47 An equally valid motto, therefore, might be "I'll see it when I believe it." our perceptual set regarding gender guides the way we perceive and interact with newborns. Highly homophobic people are more likely than others to perceive affectionate behavior between men as sexual in nature.51 shape the way we interpret social situations.

fundamental attribution error

, in which we attribute other people's behaviors to internal rather than external causes. That driver cut you off because he or she is a jerk, not because of noisy children or any other external factor that might have motivated that behavior.

controllability

- causes for behavior vary in how controllable they are - behavior can be in or out of our control 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. In contrast, an uncontrollable attribution identifies a cause outside the person's control.

primacy effect

- the tendency to emphasize the first impression over later impressions when forming a perception - our first impressions are critical because they set the tone for all future interactions

Direct perception checking involves three elements:

1. Acknowledging the behavior you witnessed 2. Interpreting that behavior 3. Asking whether your interpretation was correct Direct perception checking involves simply asking other people if your perception of a situation is accurate.

behavior attributions (3)

1. locus 2. stability 3. controllability

influences on perceptual accuracy (3)

1. physiological states and traits 2. culture and co-culture 3. social roles

stability

A stable cause is one that is permanent semipermanent, or at least not easily changed. unstable cause: occur only from time to time in unpredictable places and with unpredictable effects Why was your boss late for lunch? Rush-hour traffic would be a stable cause for lateness, because it's a permanent feature of many people's morning commutes. In contrast, a traffic accident would be an unstable cause for lateness, because accidents occur only from time to time in unpredictable places with unpredictable effects. Notice that these are both external attributions. Internal causes for behavior also can be either stable or unstable, however.

interpretation

After noticing and classifying a stimulus, you have to assign it an interpretation to figure out what it means for you. The process of assigning meaning to information that has been selected for attention and organized. To address those questions, you likely will pay attention to three factors to interpret her behavior: your personal experience, your knowledge of her, and the closeness of your relationship with her. Your personal experience helps you assign meaning to behavior. If co-workers have been nice to you in the past just to get favors from you later, then you might be suspicious of this co-worker's behavior.12 Your knowledge of the person helps you interpret her actions. If you know she's friendly and nice to everyone, you might interpret her behavior differently than if you notice that she's being nice only to you.13 Finally, the closeness of your relationship influences how you interpret a person's behavior. When your best friend does you an unexpected favor, you probably interpret it as a sincere sign of friendship. In contrast, when a co-worker does you a favor, you are more likely to wonder whether he or she has an ulterior motive.14

avatar, which is a graphic representation of a user that online communicators construct.

Although avatars are not "real" people, they represent real people, so we become accustomed to perceiving them in many of the same ways we perceive people around us. Avatars should look as human as possible. Some people create avatars that are based on images of animals or inanimate objects. Nowak and Rauh found, however, that human-looking avatars were perceived to be more credible and more attractive. Avatars should have a defined gender. Many avatars appear androgynous, meaning that it is difficult to tell whether the avatar is intended to be female or male. According to the research, people prefer interacting with avatars that they perceive as clearly male or female rather than androgynous. • 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.

physiological traits are conditions that affect us on an ongoing basis.

Compared with states, which are continually changing, traits are more enduring. For example, perception relies a great deal on our senses-our abilities to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. A voice that sounds just right to a hearing-impaired person may seem too loud to others. Another physiological trait is our biological rhythm, or the cycle of daily changes we go through in body temperature, alertness, and mood. Everyone's biological rhythm is a little different.

A social role is a set of behaviors that are expected of someone in a particular social situation.

Each of us plays several social roles, and those roles can also influence the accuracy of our perceptions. One example is gender roles. Gender and biological sex affect a range of communication behaviors, so it's not surprising that they influence the perceptions we form of others.

Improving your perceptual ability involves two stages.

First you need to identify your initial perception by exploring characteristics about yourself, the other person, and the context of the situation that may be influencing your perception. Then you need to check your perception by considering what is factual and interpretive, and whether there may be alternative perceptions. First, you have to be mindful of the factors that influence what perception you form of a situation. Second, you have to check that perception by separating facts from interpretations, considering alternative perceptions, engaging in direct and indirect perception checking, and revising your perception if necessary.

Checking Your Perceptions

INTERPRETATIONS FROM FACTS- interpretations, because they all assign meaning to what you observed vs fact. describing what you actually saw or heard is not the same thing as interpreting it. GENERATE ALTERNATIVE PERCEPTIONS- requires you to look at information about the situation that doesn't match your original perception. Second, generating alternative perceptions encourages you to ask yourself what information you don't have that might be relevant. ENGAGE IN PERCEPTION-CHECKING BEHAVIOR- the process of testing your perceptions for accuracy. when you act on the basis of inaccurate perceptions, you run the risk of turning a situation from bad to worse. You can engage in either direct or indirect means of perception checking. REVISE YOUR PERCEPTIONS AS NECESSARY- 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 considered: (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.

organization

Once you've noticed a particular stimulus, the next step in the perception process is to classify it. This task, called organization, helps you make sense of the information by revealing how it is similar to, and different from, other things you know about. To classify a stimulus, your mind applies a perceptual schema to it, or a mental framework for organizing information. ccording to communication researcher Peter Andersen, we use four types of schema to classify information we notice about other people: physical constructs, role constructs, interaction constructs, and psychological constructs.8 • 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. • Role constructs emphasize people's social or professional position, so we notice that a person is a teacher, an accountant, a father, a community leader, and so on.9 • Interaction constructs emphasize people's behavior, so we notice that a person is outgoing, aggressive, shy, sarcastic, or considerate. • Psychological constructs emphasize people's thoughts and feelings, causing us to perceive that a person is angry, self-assured, insecure, envious, or worried.

Being Mindful of Your Perceptions- KNOW YOURSELF.

One part of being mindful of your perceptions, therefore, is to ask yourself how they are influenced by your personal attributes. your physiological states and traits can also shape your perceptions. If you were tired or hungry when you overheard Dmitri and Min's exchange, for example, you might have felt short-tempered and been more likely than usual to rush to judgment one way or the other. Your experiences with previous jobs could also bias your perceptions of Dmitri and Min by creating a perceptual set. your experiences would have created a perceptual set that shaped your perceptions. hat we can do is ask ourselves how factors such as our experiences, sex, cultural background, and physiological states and traits might affect the perceptions we make. Acknowledging those influences is one of the first steps in improving our perceptual ability.

influence our perceptions of others' behaviors.

Our experience and occupational roles, gender roles. visual cues

Three Stages of the Perception Process

SELECTION, ORGANIZATION.INTERPRETATION. That doesn't necessarily mean the process is always linear, however. The three stages of perception-selecting, organizing, and interpreting information-overlap.15 How we interpret a behavior depends on what we notice about it, for example, but what we notice can also depend on the way we interpret it.

six fundamental forces that affect our perceptions.

Stereotyping Relies on Generalizations, The Primacy Effect Governs First Impressions, The Recency Effect Influences Impressions, Our Perceptual Set Limits What We Perceive, Egocentrism Narrows Our Perspective, Positivity and Negativity Biases Affect Perception

stereotypes, which are generalizations about a group or category of people that can have powerful influences on how we perceive those people.

Stereotyping is a three-part process: • First, we identify a group we believe another person belongs to ("you are a blonde"). • Second, we recall some generalization others often make about the people in that group ("blondes have more fun"). • Finally, we apply that generalization to the person ("therefore, you must have more fun"). not always innacurate

selection

The process of attending to a stimulus. Rather than paying attention to all the stimuli in your environment, you engage in selection, the process in which your mind and body help you choose certain stimuli to attend to. For example, you notice your classmate smiling at you without paying attention to what others in the classroom are saying or doing. You notice that your friend failed to wish you a happy birthday on Facebook, but you ignore the text message she sent you. Clearly, the information you attend to influences the perceptions you form. Importantly, we don't necessarily make conscious decisions about which stimuli to notice and which to ignore. Rather, as research indicates, three characteristics especially make a particular stimulus more likely to be selected for attention. First, being unusual or unexpected makes a stimulus stand out.5 For instance, you might not pay attention to people talking loudly while walking across campus, but hearing the same conversation in the library would probably spark your attention, because it would be unusual in that environment. Or perhaps you're walking back to your car after a night class and you don't take particular notice of other students walking along the same sidewalk, but you do notice an older, poorly dressed man pushing a shopping cart. His presence stands out to you because you aren't used to seeing people on campus who look like him. Second, repetition, or how frequently you're exposed to a stimulus, makes it stand out.6 For example, you're more likely to remember radio ads you've heard repeatedly than ones you've heard only once. Similarly, you tend to notice more characteristics about the people you see frequently than about those you seldom see, such as their physical appearance and behavior patterns. Third, the intensity of a stimulus affects how much you take notice of it. You notice strong odors more than weak ones, for instance, and bright and flashy colors more than dull and muted ones.7

visual cues

The 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 not always describe themselves accurately in their profiles, it is useful to be aware of how readers' perceptions can be swayed by users' attractiveness.30

Physiological states are conditions that are temporary.

We enter and leave various physiological states, meaning that their influence comes and goes over time. For instance, the physiological state of feeling tired alters our perception of time and can make us anxious. Therefore, the five minutes we're waiting in line at the grocery store might seem much longer.1

Positivity and Negativity Biases Affect Perception

When we pay the most attention to positive information, we are exhibiting what researchers call a positivity bias - he tendency to focus heavily on a person's positive attributes when forming a perception. - Ex: the tendency for people in love to look at each other "through rose-colored glasses", overestimating the partner's positive qualities negativity bias, or the tendency to weigh negative information more heavily than positive.58 According to the negativity bias, even one piece of negative information can taint your perception of someone you would otherwise like. The negativity bias is particularly strong in competitive situations, such as job interviews and graduate school admissions.59 When many people are competing for a limited number of opportunities, even seemingly minor pieces of negative information can ruin an otherwise positive impression.

Being Mindful of Your Perceptions-FOCUS ON OTHERS' CHARACTERISTICS: THE INFLUENCE OF GENDER AND CULTURE.

acknowledging how our perceptions are influenced by characteristics of the people we're perceiving. You might think the sex of the people involved wouldn't matter-legally and ethically, it shouldn't-but 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, so it should come as no surprise that it also influences the way we perceive behavior. When we observe interactions between people from our own culture, our shared knowledge about cultural norms enables us to perceive and interpret their behaviors with relative ease. However, when we observe interactions between people from other cultures, we are more likely to misinterpret their behaviors. One reason why this is true is that people's cultural backgrounds can activate stereotypes that can influence our perceptions.

An attribution is simply an explanation, the answer to a "why" question.

an explanation for an observed behavior. 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.

Being Mindful of Your Perceptions-CONSIDER THE CONTEXT.

consider how the context itself influenced them. Positivity biases and negativity biases can also shape your perceptions. An important part of being mindful of your perceptions, therefore, is to ask whether there are pieces of information to which you didn't have access.

Egocentrism Narrows Our Perspective

egocentric, meaning they lack the ability to take another person's perspective. Jean Piaget, egocentrism is a normal part of development for children ages 2 to 6.5. most people grow out of the egocentric stage by mid-childhood, even adults can behave egocentrically from time to time The opposite of being egocentric is being altercentric, or focused on the perspective of another person instead of your own.

A third common attribution error is 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. form of mental laziness. Instead of trying to understand why Fatima might push herself so hard in school, we pick something obvious about her (she's an only child) and conclude that it must have something to do with that. the more men engage in this form of over-attribution with women in general, the more likely they are to be verbally abusive with their own wives. The researchers noted that engaging in this form of overattribution causes men to perceive their wives as being critical even when they aren't, simply because they are women. As one result, men form defensive thoughts that provoke their verbal aggression. easy to do with marginalized groups such as sexual minorities, homeless people, and people with disabilities.77 Because members of these groups are marginalized, some people don't have much experience interacting with them. This lack of communication might make it easier to believe that the group a person belongs to is the primary cause of his or her behaviors. For that reason, it's important to remember that being homeless or gay might be one characteristic of a person, but it doesn't define the person completely, and it's not the cause of everything that person says or does.

Physiology

is the study of the mechanical and biochemical ways in which our bodies work. Many aspects of our physiology influence the way we perceive the world.16

indirect perception checking involves

listening and observing in order to seek additional information about the situation.

he self-serving bias refers to our tendency to attribute

our successes to stable, internal causes while attributing our failures to unstable, external causes. attributions are called self-serving because they suggest that our successes are deserved but our failures are not our fault. The self-serving bias deals primarily with attributions that we make for our own behaviors. However, research shows that we often extend that tendency to other important people in our lives. a natural, self-protective tendency, although it is a form of self-delusion.

first impression

principle primacy effect, first impressions are critical because they set the tone for all future interactions. Our first impressions of someone seem to stick in our mind more. In an early study of the primacy effect, 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." * Notice that most of those adjectives are negative, but when the description begins with a positive one (intelligent), the effects of the more negative ones that follow it are diminished. 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. the primacy effect means that first impressions are powerful, not that they are unchangeable.

Perception

process of making meaning from the things we experience in our environment, and when we apply this process to people and relationships, we engage in interpersonal perception.

The Recency Effect Influences Impressions

recency effect, which says that the most recent impression we have of someone is more powerful than our earlier impressions. The tendency to emphasize the most recent impression over earlier impressions when forming a perception. Which is the more important impression-the first or the most recent? The answer is that both appear to be more important than any impressions that we form in between.46

attribution errors

self-serving bias, the fundamental attribution error, and overattribution are easy mistakes to commit. Self-Serving Bias - We attribute our successes to internal causes and our failures to external causes. Fundamental Attribution Error- We attribute other people's behaviors to internal causes more often than to external causes. - Ex: the cashier gave you the wrong change because he doesn't know how to count, not because he was distracted by an announcement being made over the loudspeaker Overattribution- We focus on one characteristic of a person and attribute a wide variety of behaviors to that characteristic. - Ex: Karl is an only child. When you see Karl being impatient or acting selfishly, you might say to yourself, " That's typical of an only child." - making one characteristic the underlining cause to everything a person does

physiology

the study of the mechanical and biochemical ways in which our bodies work. physiological states- - conditions that are temporary; their influence comes and goes - Ex: the physiological state of feeling tired alters our perception of time and can make us anxious physiological traits- - conditions that affect us on an ongoing basis; more enduring then states - Ex: perception relies a great deal on our senses-our ability to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell

Locus refers to where the cause of a behavior is "located," whether within ourselves or outside ourselves.

whether they're internal or external. 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.