Interpersonal Communication Chapter 3

The Ladder of Abstraction

Action, judgement, label, perception, total reality

Perception

Active process of creating meaning by selecting, organizing and interpreting people, objects, events, situations and other phenomena. To do so, we only select certain things to notice, and then we organize and interpret what we have selectively noticed.

Attributions

An attribution is an explanation of why something happened or why someone as a certain way. Attributions have four dimensions.

Age

As we grow older and have more experiences, both pleasant and challenging, our perspective on many things changes.

locus

attributes a person's actions to internal factors ("He has no patience with people who are late") or external factors ("The traffic jam frustrated him").

Personal constructs

"Mental yardstick" we use to measure a person or situation along a bipolar dimension of judgement. Examples of this are intelligent- not intelligent, responsible-not responsible. Whereas prototypes help us decide into which broad category a phenomenon fits, personal constructs let us make more detailed assessments of particular qualities of people and other phenomena

Self

A final influence on our perceptions is ourselves. Each of us also tends to have an implicit personality theory, which is a collection of unspoken and sometimes unconscious assumptions of how various qualities fit together in human personalities. Most of us think certain qualities go together in people. if you're fun then you're also outgoing.

Stereotypes

A predictive generalization applied to a person or situation. Based on the category in which we place someone or something and how that person or thing measures up against the personal constructs we apply, we predict what he, she, or it will do

Prototype

A prototype defines the clearest or most representative example of some category. Each of these categories is exemplified by a person who is the ideal; that's the prototype. Prototypes organize our perceptions by allowing us to place people and other phenomena in broad categories. We then consider how close they are to our prototype, or exemplar, of that category.

roles

Both the training we receive to fulfill a role and the actual demands of the role affect what we notice and how we interpret and evaluate the role

Responsibility

Do we hold a person responsible for a particular behavior? We're more likely to hold people responsible for behavior that we think they can control. How we account for others' actions affects our perceptions of them and our relationships with them. We can feel more or less positive toward others depending on our interpretation of why they act as they do

Cognitive Abilities...

How elaborately we think about situations and people, and our personal knowledge of others, affect how we perceive them.

Influences on Perception...

Individual differ in how they perceive situations and people

Fundamental Attribution Error

Involves the dimension of locus. We tend to overestimate the internal causes of other's undesirable behaviors and underestimate the internal causes of our own misdeeds and failures and overestimate the external causes.

Social media and perception

Our choices of social media shape our perceptions of events, issues, and people. Second, our cultural memberships influence the content of our digital and online communication. Third, think about the relationship between social media and our perceptions and expectations of time. It has also altered our sense of space.

Expectations

Our expectations also affect what we notice. The impact of expectations on perception explains the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Guidelines for improving perception and communication

Recognize that all perceptions are partial and subjective, avoid mind reading (assuming we understand what another person thinks, feels, or perceives), check perceptions with others (perception checking is an important communication skills because it helps people arrive at mutual understands of each other and their relationship), distinguish between facts and inferences, guard against the self-serving bias, guard against the fundamental attribution error, monitor labels

Perception consists of three processes

Selecting, organizing and interpreting. These processes are continuous so they blend into one another. they are also interactive, so each other them affects the other

Scripts

The final cognitive schema we use to organize perceptions is the script. Scripts consist of sequences of activities that are expected of us and others in particular situations. They are based on our experiences and observations of interaction in various contexts

Culture

The totality of beliefs, values, understandings, practices and ways of interpreting experience that are shared by a number of people. The influence is so pervasive that its hard to realize how powerfully it shapes our perceptions. Social location-we are not only affected by the culture as a whole but by the particular social groups to which we belong. A standpoint is a point of view that grows out of political awareness of the social location of the group.

Self-Serving Bias

This is a bias towards ourselves and our interests. People tend to construct attributions that serve our personal interests. We tend to avoid taking responsibility for negative actions and failures by attributing them to external, unstable and specific factors that are beyond personal control

Interpretation

We assign meaning by interpreting what we have noticed and organized. Interpretation is the subjective process of explaining our perceptions in ways that make sense to us. To interpret the meaning of another's actions, we construct explanations, or attributions for them.

Physiology

We differ in sensory abilities and physiologies. Medical conditions are another physiological influence on perceptions. Changes in our bodies caused by medical conditions

Organization

We organize what we have noticed and attribute meaning to it. A useful theory for explaining how we organize experience is constructivism which states that we organize and interpret experience by applying cognitive structures called schemata. We rely on four schemata to make sense of interpersonal phenomena: prototypes, personal constructs, stereotypes, and scripts.

Selection

We select to attend certain stimuli based on a number of factors. We notice things that stand out. Change compels attention. We use the prefrontal cortex, which is known as the brains planning center, to focus our attention deliberately. Cultures also influence what we select to perceive.

stability

explains actions as result of stable factors that wont change over time ("She's a Type A personality") or unstable factors that may or will be different another time ("She acted that way because she has a headache right now"). Concerns time (Whether the reason is temporary or enduring)

Specificity

explains behavior in terms of whether the behavior has global implications that apply in most or all situations ("He's a big spender") or specific implications that apply only in certain situations or under certain conditions ("He spends a lot of money on clothes."-concerns the breadth of the explanation (all situations, events and places, or particular or limited situations and places.)

cognitive complexity

refers to the number of personal constructs used, how abstract they are, and how elaborately they interact to shape perceptions.

person centeredness

related to cognitive complexity because it entails abstract thinking and use of a wide range of schemata. Ability to perceive another a unique individual. Use knowledge of particular others to guide their communication. Person-centeredness is not empathy. Empathy is the ability to feel another person, to feel what she or he feels in a situation