1. Perception and Communication
Chapter 3
Perception and Communication

2. Topics covered The Process of Human Perception
Influences on Perception
Social Media and Perception
Guidelines for Improving Perception and Communication

3. After studying…
Recognize how perception is made up of means of selecting, organizing, and interpreting the world to create meaning.
Identify factors that affect individuals’ perceptions.
List examples of the reciprocal relationship between your perceptions and social media.

4. In everyday communication, our words affect how we perceive others, situations, events, behaviors, and ourselves.
At the same time, our perceptions shape what things mean to us and hence the labels we use to name them.
We communicate with others according to how we perceive and define them, and we may miss opportunities when our labels limit what we perceive.

5. The Process of Human Perception
Perception: the active process of creating meaning by selecting, organizing, and interpreting people, objects, events, situations and other phenomena
Note that perception is defined as an active process. We do not passively receive what is “out there” in the external world.

6. They are;
continuous, so they blend into one another.
also interactive, so each of them affects the other two.
For example, what we select to perceive
in a particular situation affects how we organize and interpret the situation. At the same time, how we organize and interpret a situation affects our subsequent selections of what to perceive in the situation.

7. Selection
We select to attend to certain stimuli based on a number of factors:
The qualities of the phenomena
Self-indication
Our motives and needs
Culture

9. Which of the following is most distracting to drivers?
a. Listening to an audiotape
b. Talking on a hand-held phone
c. Using a speech-to-text system
d. Talking on a hands-free phone
When drivers need to concentrate on a task such as posting on Facebook, they are prone to inattention blindness, which is the tendency not to see what is right in front of them.

10. Organization
Constructivism – we organize and interpret experience by applying cognitive structures called schemata
Prototype
Personal construct
Stereotype
Script

11. Interpretation
The subjective process of explaining our perceptions in ways that make sense to us
Attributions
Locus
Stability
Specificity
Responsibility

12. Interpretation Attributional Errors Self-serving bias
Fundamental attribution error

13. Influences On Perception
Physiology
Age
Expectations
Culture
Social location
Roles

14. Influences On Perception Continued
Cognitive abilities
Cognitive complexity
Person-centeredness
Self

15. Implicit Personality Theory
A collection of unspoken and sometimes unconscious assumptions about how various qualities fit together in human personalities

16. Guidelines for Improving Perception And Communication
Recognize that all perceptions are partial and subjective
Avoid mind reading
Check perceptions with others
Distinguish between facts and inferences
Guard against the self-serving bias
Guard against the fundamental attribution error
Monitor labels