Interpersonal Communication - Chapter 3

Horn effect

The tendency to negatively interpret the communication and behavior of people for whom we have negative gestalts.

Halo effect

The tendency to positively interpret something someone does because we have a positive gestalt for them.

How to improve perception

-Offer empathy -Embrace embrace world minded-ness -Engage in perception-checking

World minded-ness

Acceptance of and respect towards other cultures beliefs, values and customs

Ethnocentrism

Belief that your own cultural beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices are superior to those of others

Algebraic impressions

Carefully comparing and assessing BOTH negative and positive things we learn about a person to calculate an overall impression

Stereotyping

Categorizing people into social groups and then evaluate them based on information we have in our schemata related to these groups. Why don't judge them personally we judge them based on their social group affiliations

Perception checking

Check your punctuation Check your knowledge Check your attribution Check your perceptual influences Check your impressions

ingroupers

How you perceive people who are similar to you. these will often be your friends

Emotion sharing

Involves disclosing emotions talking about them and pondering them

Empathy

We feel into others thoughts and emotions making an attempt to understand from their point of view and be aware of their feelings in order to identify with them.

Emotional contagion

When one emotion spreads from one person to the rest

gestalt

a general sense of a person that is either positive or negative. we discern a few traits and drawing upon our schemata we arrive at a judgement based on these traits.

external attribution

a persons communication is caused by factors unrelated to personal qualities.

internal attribution

a persons communication or behavior stems from internal causes such as character or personality

negativity effect

across cultures people perceive negative information as more informative about someone's true character than positive information

personality

an individuals characteristic way of thinking, feeling, and acting, based on the trait, enduring motives and impulses that he or she possesses.

interpretation

assigning meaning to that information you just took in.

outgroupers

how you perceive people who aren't similar to you

self serving bias

in a case where our actions result in noteworthy success, either personal or professional we typically take credit for the success by making and internal attribution. ex: if you persuaded your friend to let them borrow you their car you will think wow I'm so persuasive and charming. when in reality they might have just been feeling generous.

attributions

in addition to drawing up a schemata to interpret information from interpersonal encounters we create explanations for others comments or behaviors. attributions are our answers to our everyday "why" questions,

interpersonal impressions

mental pictures of who people are and how we feel about them. All aspects of the perception process shape our interpersonal impressions, the info we select as the focus of our attention, the way we organize that information, the interpretations we make based on knowledge in our schemata , our attributions and even our uncertainty

schemata

mental structure that contain information defining the characteristics of various concepts, as well as how those characteristics are related to each other. so if you see someone in a tux, with roses and a diamond ring you would categorize that as a marriage proposal the knowledge we draw on when interpreting interpersonal communication resides here.

organization

once you have selected something as the focus of your attention you take that into formation and structure it into a coherent pattern inside your mind, it a phase of the perception process

uncertainty reduction theory

our primary compulsion during initial interactions is to reduce uncertainty about the person we are communicating with. we do this by finding out more about them using one of the 3 strategies. PASSIVE STRATEGY: observing them ACTIVE STRATEGY: asking other people about them INTERACTIVE STRATEGY: interact with them directly.

implicit personality theories

personal beliefs about the different types of personalities and ways in which traits cluster together. when we meet someone for the first time we use implicit personality theories to perceive a little of their personality and then we assume much more, making us feel like we know the person and help reduce uncertainty.

selection

selection is the first step of perception, it involves focusing attention on certain sights, sounds tastes touches or smells in our environment. example when you hear your roommate enter you will select her communication as the focus of your attention.

punctuation

structuring the information you have selected into a chronological sequence that matches how you experienced the order of events. this occurs during organization

salience

the degree to which particular people or aspects of their communication attract our attention. ex: when something is salient it seems especially noticeable and significant

Perception

the process of selecting organizing and interpreting information from our senses., we relly on percetion to constatntky make sense of everything.

actor-observer effect

the tendency of people to make external attributions regarding their own behaviors. example our rude responses to someones question we think of as well their question was dumb, when really we are just having a bad day and we were the rude ones. we blame external things for making us mad and remark the way we did when in reality we were actually just stressed or upset internally

fundamental attribution error

the tendency to attribute others behavior solely to internal causes like if someone texts you back you automatically assume that they don't like you, instead of maybe they were just really busy.

positivity bias

when gestalts are formed they are more likely to be positive than negative. we meet people at a party and you form a gestalt for each, based on the positivity bias the gestalts you formed are all positive, which is good for making new friends etc but sometime can lead us into an abusive relationship.