Perception is your way of understanding the world; it is the process by which you make sense out of what psychologist William James called the “booming buzzing confusion” all around you. More technically, perception is the process by which you become aware of objects, events, and especially people through your senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound. Perception is an active, not a passive, process. Your perceptions result from what exists in the outside world and from your own experiences, desires, needs and wants, loves and hatreds. Among the reasons why perception is so important in communication is that it influences your communication choices. The messages you send and listen to, the photos and messages you post and view and comment on, will depend on how you see the world, on how you size up specific situations, on what you think of the people with whom you interact.
Perception is a continuous series of processes that blend into one another. For convenience of discussion we can separate perception into five stages: (1) You sense, you pick up some kind of stimulation; (2) you organize the stimuli in some way; (3) you interpret and evaluate what you perceive; (4) you store your perception in memory; and (5) you retrieve it when needed (Figure 3.4).
In selective attention you attend to those things that you anticipate will fulfill your needs or will prove enjoyable. For instance, when daydreaming in class, you don’t hear what the instructor is saying until he or she calls your name. Your selective attention mechanism focuses your senses on your name being called.
In selective exposure you tend to expose yourself to information that will confirm your existing beliefs, that will contribute to your objectives, or that will prove satisfying in some way. For example, after you buy a car, you’re more apt to read and listen to advertisements for the car you just bought because these messages tell you that you made the right decision. At the same time, you will tend to avoid advertisements for the cars that you considered but eventually rejected because these messages would tell you that you made the wrong decision.
Another rule is similarity, a principle stating that things that look alike or are similar in other ways belong together and form a unit. This principle leads you to see people who dress alike as belonging together. Similarly, you might assume that people who work at the same jobs, who are of the same religion, who live in the same building, or who talk with the same accent belong together.
You use the principle of contrast when you conclude that some items (people or messages, for example) don’t belong together because they’re too different from each other to be part of the same unit. So, for example, in a conversation or a public speech, you’ll focus your attention on changes in intensity or rate because these contrast with the rest of the message.
You develop schemata from your own experience—actual experiences as well as vicarious experiences from television, reading, and hearsay. Thus, for example, you may have a schema that portrays college athletes as strong, ambitious, academically weak, and egocentric. And, of course, you’ve probably developed schemata for different religious, racial, and national groups; for men and women; and for people of different affectional orientations. Each group that you have some familiarity with will be represented in your mind in some kind of schema. Schemata help you organize your perceptions by allowing you to classify millions of people into a manageable number of categories or classes. As you’ll soon see, however, schemata can also create problems—they can influence you to see what is not there or to miss seeing what is there.
Everyone relies on shortcuts—rules, schemata, and scripts, for example, are all useful shortcuts to simplify understanding, remembering, and recalling information about people and events. If you didn’t have these shortcuts, you’d have to treat each person, role, or action differently from each other person, role, or action. This would make every experience totally new, totally unrelated to anything you already know. If you didn’t use these shortcuts, you’d be unable to generalize, draw connections, or otherwise profit from previously acquired knowledge.
Shortcuts, however, may mislead you; they may contribute to your remembering things that are consistent with your schemata (even if they didn’t occur) and distorting or forgetting information that is inconsistent. Judgments about members of other cultures are often ethnocentric. Because you form schemata and scripts on the basis of your own cultural beliefs and experiences, you can easily (but inappropriately) apply these to members of other cultures. It’s easy to infer that when members of other cultures do things that conform to your scripts, they’re right, and when they do things that contradict your scripts, they’re wrong—a classic example of ethnocentric thinking. As you can appreciate, this tendency can easily contribute to intercultural misunderstandings.
A similar problem arises when you base your schemata for different cultural groups on stereotypes that you may have derived from television or movies. So, for example, you may have schemata for religious Muslims that you derived from stereotypes presented in the media. If you then apply these schemata to all Muslims, you risk seeing only what conforms to your script and failing to see or distorting what does not conform to your script.
For example, when you meet a new person who is introduced to you as a college football player, you will tend to apply your schema to this person and may view him (perhaps) as strong, ambitious, academically weak, and egocentric. You will, in other words, see this person through the filter of your schema and evaluate him according to your schema for college athletes. Similarly, when viewing someone asking for a date, you will apply your script to this event and view the event through the script. You will interpret the actions of the suitor as appropriate or inappropriate depending on your script for date-requesting behavior and on the ways in which the suitor performs the sequence of actions.
Now, let’s say that at different times you hear that Ben failed Spanish I (normally an A or B course at your school), that Ben got an A in chemistry (normally a tough course), and that Ben is transferring to Harvard as a theoretical physics major. Schemata act as filters or gatekeepers; they allow certain information to be stored in relatively objective form, much as you heard or read it, but may distort or prevent other information from being stored. As a result, these three items of information about Ben may get stored very differently in your memory along with your schema for college athletes.
For example, you may readily store the information that Ben failed Spanish because it’s consistent with your schema; it fits neatly into the template that you have of college athletes. Information that’s consistent with your schema—as in this example—will strengthen your schema and make it more resistant to change (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2010). Depending on the strength of your schema, you may also store in memory (even though you didn’t hear it) the “information” that Ben did poorly in other courses as well. The information that Ben got an A in chemistry, because it contradicts your schema (it just doesn’t seem right), may easily be distorted or lost. The information that Ben is transferring to Harvard, however, is a bit different. This information also is inconsistent with your schema; but it is so drastically inconsistent that you may begin to look at this mindfully. Perhaps you’ll begin to question your schema for athletes, or perhaps you’ll view Ben as an exception to the general rule. In either case, you’re going to etch Ben’s transferring to Harvard very clearly in your mind.
What you remember about a person or an event isn’t an objective recollection; it’s more likely heavily influenced by your preconceptions or your schemata about what belongs and what doesn’t belong. Your reconstruction of an event or person contains a lot of information that was not in your original experience and may omit a lot that was in this experience.
Perception is a continuous series of processes that blend into one another. For convenience of discussion we can separate perception into five stages: (1) You sense, you pick up some kind of stimulation; (2) you organize the stimuli in some way; (3) you interpret and evaluate what you perceive; (4) you store your perception in memory; and (5) you retrieve it when needed (Figure 3.4).
3.3.1 Stage 1: Stimulation
At the first stage of perception, your sense organs are stimulated—you hear a new album, you read someone’s tweet, you see a friend, you smell someone’s perfume, you taste an orange, you feel another’s sweaty palm. Naturally, you don’t perceive everything; rather, you engage in selective perception, which includes selective attention and selective exposure.In selective attention you attend to those things that you anticipate will fulfill your needs or will prove enjoyable. For instance, when daydreaming in class, you don’t hear what the instructor is saying until he or she calls your name. Your selective attention mechanism focuses your senses on your name being called.
In selective exposure you tend to expose yourself to information that will confirm your existing beliefs, that will contribute to your objectives, or that will prove satisfying in some way. For example, after you buy a car, you’re more apt to read and listen to advertisements for the car you just bought because these messages tell you that you made the right decision. At the same time, you will tend to avoid advertisements for the cars that you considered but eventually rejected because these messages would tell you that you made the wrong decision.
3.3.2 Stage 2: Organization
At the second stage of perception, you organize the information your senses pick up. Three interesting ways in which you organize your perceptions are (1) by rules, (2) by schemata, and (3) by scripts.3.3.2.1 Organization by Rules
One frequently used rule of perception is that of proximity, or physical closeness. The rule says that things that are physically close together constitute a unit. Thus, using this rule, you would perceive people who are often together, or messages spoken one right after the other, as units, as belonging together. You also assume that the verbal and nonverbal signals sent at about the same time are related and constitute a unified whole.Another rule is similarity, a principle stating that things that look alike or are similar in other ways belong together and form a unit. This principle leads you to see people who dress alike as belonging together. Similarly, you might assume that people who work at the same jobs, who are of the same religion, who live in the same building, or who talk with the same accent belong together.
You use the principle of contrast when you conclude that some items (people or messages, for example) don’t belong together because they’re too different from each other to be part of the same unit. So, for example, in a conversation or a public speech, you’ll focus your attention on changes in intensity or rate because these contrast with the rest of the message.
3.3.2.2 Organization by Schemata
Another way you organize material is by creating schemata (or schemas), mental templates or structures that help you organize the millions of items of information you come into contact with every day as well as those you already have in memory. Schemata may thus be viewed as general ideas about people (Pat and Chris, Japanese, Baptists, New Yorkers); about yourself (your qualities, abilities, and even liabilities); or about social roles (the attributes of police officers, professors, or multimillionaires).You develop schemata from your own experience—actual experiences as well as vicarious experiences from television, reading, and hearsay. Thus, for example, you may have a schema that portrays college athletes as strong, ambitious, academically weak, and egocentric. And, of course, you’ve probably developed schemata for different religious, racial, and national groups; for men and women; and for people of different affectional orientations. Each group that you have some familiarity with will be represented in your mind in some kind of schema. Schemata help you organize your perceptions by allowing you to classify millions of people into a manageable number of categories or classes. As you’ll soon see, however, schemata can also create problems—they can influence you to see what is not there or to miss seeing what is there.
3.3.2.3 Organization by Scripts
A script is a type of schema. Like a schema, a script is an organized body of information; but a script focuses on an action, event, or procedure. It’s a general idea of how some event should unfold; it’s the rules governing events and their sequence. For example, you probably have a script for eating in a restaurant with the actions organized into a pattern something like this: Enter, take a seat, review the menu, order from the menu, eat your food, ask for the bill, leave a tip, pay the bill, and exit the restaurant. Similarly, you probably have scripts for how you do laundry, how you behave in an interview, the stages you go through in introducing someone to someone else, and the way you ask for a date.Everyone relies on shortcuts—rules, schemata, and scripts, for example, are all useful shortcuts to simplify understanding, remembering, and recalling information about people and events. If you didn’t have these shortcuts, you’d have to treat each person, role, or action differently from each other person, role, or action. This would make every experience totally new, totally unrelated to anything you already know. If you didn’t use these shortcuts, you’d be unable to generalize, draw connections, or otherwise profit from previously acquired knowledge.
Shortcuts, however, may mislead you; they may contribute to your remembering things that are consistent with your schemata (even if they didn’t occur) and distorting or forgetting information that is inconsistent. Judgments about members of other cultures are often ethnocentric. Because you form schemata and scripts on the basis of your own cultural beliefs and experiences, you can easily (but inappropriately) apply these to members of other cultures. It’s easy to infer that when members of other cultures do things that conform to your scripts, they’re right, and when they do things that contradict your scripts, they’re wrong—a classic example of ethnocentric thinking. As you can appreciate, this tendency can easily contribute to intercultural misunderstandings.
A similar problem arises when you base your schemata for different cultural groups on stereotypes that you may have derived from television or movies. So, for example, you may have schemata for religious Muslims that you derived from stereotypes presented in the media. If you then apply these schemata to all Muslims, you risk seeing only what conforms to your script and failing to see or distorting what does not conform to your script.
3.3.3 Stage 3: Interpretation–Evaluation
The interpretation–evaluation step (a linked term because the two processes cannot be separated) is inevitably subjective and is greatly influenced by your experiences, needs, wants, values, expectations, physical and emotional state, gender, and beliefs about the way things are or should be, as well as by your rules, schemata, and scripts.For example, when you meet a new person who is introduced to you as a college football player, you will tend to apply your schema to this person and may view him (perhaps) as strong, ambitious, academically weak, and egocentric. You will, in other words, see this person through the filter of your schema and evaluate him according to your schema for college athletes. Similarly, when viewing someone asking for a date, you will apply your script to this event and view the event through the script. You will interpret the actions of the suitor as appropriate or inappropriate depending on your script for date-requesting behavior and on the ways in which the suitor performs the sequence of actions.
3.3.4 Stage 4: Memory
You store in memory both your perceptions and their interpretations–evaluations. So, for example, you have in memory your schema for college athletes, and you know that Ben Williams is a football player. Ben Williams is then stored in memory with “cognitive tags” that tell you that he’s strong, ambitious, academically weak, and egocentric. That is, despite the fact that you’ve not witnessed Ben’s strength or ambitions and have no idea of his academic record or his psychological profile, you still may store your memory of Ben along with the qualities that make up your script for “college athletes.”Now, let’s say that at different times you hear that Ben failed Spanish I (normally an A or B course at your school), that Ben got an A in chemistry (normally a tough course), and that Ben is transferring to Harvard as a theoretical physics major. Schemata act as filters or gatekeepers; they allow certain information to be stored in relatively objective form, much as you heard or read it, but may distort or prevent other information from being stored. As a result, these three items of information about Ben may get stored very differently in your memory along with your schema for college athletes.
For example, you may readily store the information that Ben failed Spanish because it’s consistent with your schema; it fits neatly into the template that you have of college athletes. Information that’s consistent with your schema—as in this example—will strengthen your schema and make it more resistant to change (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2010). Depending on the strength of your schema, you may also store in memory (even though you didn’t hear it) the “information” that Ben did poorly in other courses as well. The information that Ben got an A in chemistry, because it contradicts your schema (it just doesn’t seem right), may easily be distorted or lost. The information that Ben is transferring to Harvard, however, is a bit different. This information also is inconsistent with your schema; but it is so drastically inconsistent that you may begin to look at this mindfully. Perhaps you’ll begin to question your schema for athletes, or perhaps you’ll view Ben as an exception to the general rule. In either case, you’re going to etch Ben’s transferring to Harvard very clearly in your mind.
What you remember about a person or an event isn’t an objective recollection; it’s more likely heavily influenced by your preconceptions or your schemata about what belongs and what doesn’t belong. Your reconstruction of an event or person contains a lot of information that was not in your original experience and may omit a lot that was in this experience.
3.3.5 Stage 5: Recall
At some later date, you may want to recall or access information you have stored in memory. Let’s say you want to retrieve your information about Ben because he’s the topic of discussion among you and a few friends. As you’ll see in the discussion of listening in the next chapter, memory isn’t reproductive; you don’t simply reproduce what you’ve heard or seen. Rather, you reconstruct what you’ve heard or seen into a whole that is meaningful to you—depending in great part on your schemata and scripts—and it’s this reconstruction that you store in memory. Now, when you want to retrieve this information from memory, you may recall it with a variety of inaccuracies. You’re likely to:■ Recall information that is consistent with your schema. In fact, you may not even recall the specific information you’re looking for (about Ben, for example) but actually just your schema (which contains the information about college athletes and therefore contains information about Ben).
■ Fail to recall information that is inconsistent with your schema. You have no place to put that information, so you easily lose it or forget it.
■ Recall information that drastically contradicts your schema. Because it forces you to think (and perhaps rethink) about your schema and its accuracy, it may even force you to revise your schema.
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