Intro to Comms - Chapter 2

Person-Centered Perception

the ability to perceive another as a unique and distinct individual apart from social roles and generalizations.

Culture

Beliefs, understandings, practices, and ways of interpreting experiences that are shared by a number of people.

Personal Constructs

A bipolar mental yardstick that allows us to measure people and situations along specific dimensions of judgment..

Attributions

A casual account that explains why a thing happened or why someone acted a certain way.

Prototype

A knowledge structure that defines the clearest or most representative example of some category.

Stereotypes

A predictive generalization about people and situations.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

An expectation or judgement of ourselves brought about by our own actions.

Mind Reading

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

Schemata

Cognitive structures we use to organize and interpret experiences.

Scripts

One of the four cognitive schemata. A script defines an expected or appropriate sequence of action in a particular setting.

Empathy

The ability to feel with another person or to feel what that person feels in a given situation.

Perception

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

Cognitive Complexity

The number of constructs used, how abstract they are, and how elaborately they interact to create perceptions.

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 that we control and to attribute negative actions and failures to unstable, specific, external influences beyond our control.

Standpoint Theory

The theory that a culture includes a number of social groups that differently shape the knowledge, identities, and opportunities of members of those groups.

Constructivism

Theory that claims we organize and interpret experience by applying cognitive structures called schemata.