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.