Communications Unit 3

Guidelines for improving perception and communication 2

Avoid mind reading, assuming we understand what another person thinks, feels, or perceives. We need to avoid assuming that we know what another person thinks or how she or he perceives a particular situation.

attribution

An internal account of why something happens or why someone acted a certain way.

mind reading

Assuming that we understand what another person thinks or how another person perceives something.

fundamental attribution error

Overestimating the internal causes of others' behavior and underestimating the external causes.

script

A definition of expected or appropriate sequences of action in a particular setting. Scripts are one of the four cognitive schemata; not the same as an identity script.

Guidelines for improving perception and communication 3

Perception checking occurs when we ask others to what extent our perceptions are accurate so that we can create a shared understanding of each other, the situation, and our relationship.

Guidelines for improving perception and communication 1

Recognize that all perceptions are partial and subjective. We need to understand that all of our perceptions occur at a point in time, represent only a portion of the stimuli we could notice, and cannot be determined to be true or false.

Selection

We consciously select which of the infinite number of stimuli around us is most relevant at any point in time.

Guidelines for improving perception and communication 4

We need to distinguish the difference between facts (those things we can verify based on observation) and inferences (those things we create by interpreting what we have observed).

Interpretation

the process of attaching meaning or explanations to what we have noticed and organized.

culture

Beliefs, understandings, practices, and ways to interpret experience that are shared by a group of people.

personal construct

Bipolar mental yardsticks by which we measure people and situations along specific dimensions of judgment.

Guidelines for improving perception and communication 5

Guard against self serving bias because it can distort our perceptions.

cognitive complexity

In our interpretation of experience, the number of constructs used, how abstract they are, and how elaborately they interact to create perceptions.

prototype

Knowledge structures that define the clearest or most representative examples of some category.

Guidelines for improving perception and communication 7

Monitor labels. We need to remember that what label we attach to a particular interaction affects not only how we perceive that situation, but also how we will behave in future interactions.

implicit personality theory

Our often unconscious assumptions about what qualities fit together in human personalities.

Social Location

Our various standpoints, or social groups to which we belong in a particular culture, shape our point of view.

stereotypes

Predictive generalizations about people and situations.

empathy

The ability to feel with another person, to feel what she or he feels.

perception

The active process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting people, objects, events, situations, and activities.

How we are taught to enact social roles and the behaviors we actually perform to carry out our social roles influence

how we perceive the world around us.

Cognitive abilities

indicate the connection between the number of different interpretations we can create for a situation and our perception.

Human physiology

indicates that not everyone's five senses, biorhythms, or medical conditions are exactly the same.

Culture

leads each of us to have a particular set of beliefs, values, understandings, practices that influence our perception process.

standpoint

The knowledge and perspective shaped by the material, symbolic, and social conditions common to members of a social group.

interpretation

The subjective process of evaluating and explaining perceptions.

self-serving bias

The tendency to attribute our positive actions and successes to stable, global, internal influences under our control, and to attribute our negative actions and failures to unstable, specific, external influences beyond our control.

constructivism

The theory that we organize and interpret experience by applying cognitive structures called schemata.

Organization

We use four organizational structures to make sense of what we have selected to notice. Constructivism,which states that we organize and interpret experience by applying cognitive structures called schemata.

Age and the number of experiences accompanying it

alter our view or interpretation of particular communication situations.

Guidelines for improving perception and communication 6

Avoid the fundamental attribution error by looking for external reasons for others' actions and internal motivations for your own.