Chapter 3: Perception and the Self in IPC 01/24/2012

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1 Chapter 3: Perception and the Self in IPC 01/24/2012 Section 1: The Self in Interpersonal Communication Self Concept Your self concept develops from at least four sources: Others Images: Cooley s concept of looking glass self you look at the image of yourself that others (usually people most significant to you) reveal to you through the way they treat you and react to you Social Comparison: Comparing yourself to other is a way you develop self concept May compare ourselves to those less effective than us if we want to feel good for accurate assessment must look at peers Cultural Teaching: Variety of beliefs, values, and attitudes about success, religion, ethics, etc. come from parents, teachers, media, etc. Provide benchmarks to measure ourselves Self Evaluations: You interpret, react, and evaluate your own behavior Guilt, good feeling after doing good deed, etc. Self Awareness Self awareness: represents the extent to which you know yourself Your Four Selves Johari window, each part is dependent on each other part The open self: represents all information (behavior, attitudes, feelings, desires, motivations, ideas) that you and others know The blind self: all things about you that others know but of which you re ignorant The hidden self: all that you know of yourself and of others that you keep secret, overdisclosers/underdisclosers

2 The unknown self: truths about yourself that neither you nor others know Growing in self awareness: Ask about yourself who am I? test Listen to others explicit/implicit signals from interactions Actively seek information about yourself use everyday situations to gain self info See your different selves visualize how you re seen by everyone you interact with Increase your open self bring to clearer focus what you may have buried Self Esteem Self esteem: a measure of how valuable you think you are When you feel good about yourself, who you are, and what you re capable of, you will perform better Attack self destructive beliefs: Self destructive beliefs: ideas that you have about yourself that are unproductive or that make it more difficult for you to achieve your goals Examples: belief you have to be perfect, strong, please others, hurry up, take on a lot of responsibilities These beliefs set unrealistic standards Seek out Nourishing People Carl Rogers nourishing and noxious people Noxious people criticize and find fault with just about everything Nourishing people are positive and optimistic Identification with people similar to you seems to increase self esteem Work on projects that will result in success Each success will help build self esteem

3 Learn to put failure into perspective Remind Yourself of your successes People have a tendency to focus on and exaggerate their failures, missed opportunities, and social mistakes Others witnessing failures give them much less importance Relive successes and remind yourself why it happened Secure affirmation Affirmation: positive statements about yourself, statements asserting that something good or positive is true of you I am statements: self image, how you see yourself I can statements: your abilities I will statements: focus on useful and appropriate goals The way you talk to yourself will influence what you think of yourself

4 Chapter 3 01/24/2012 Section 2: Perception in Interpersonal Communication Perception: active process by which you become aware of objects, events, and especially people through your senses: sight, taste, smell, touch, hearing Result from what exists in the outside world and your own experiences, it influences your communication choices Interpersonal perception can be organized into 5 stages Stage 1: Stimulation Senses are stimulated in some way, you engage in selective perception, which encompasses selective attention and exposure Selective attention: you attend to those things that you anticipate will fulfill your needs or will prove enjoyable Selective exposure: you expose yourself to people or messages that will confirm your existing beliefs, contribute to your objectives, or prove satisfying in some way Stage 2: Organization You organize information your senses pick up, 3 ways this occurs Organization by rules: one frequently used rule is that of proximity or physical closeness: things that are physically close to each other are perceived as a unit Rule of similarity: things that are physically similar are perceived as belonging to a unit or together Rule of contrast: when items are very different from each other, you conclude that they don t belong together Organization by schemata: schemata are mental templates that help you organize the millions of items of information you come into contact with everyday general ideas about people, yourself, or social roles A stereotype is a type of schema Schemata is developed from your own experience Organization by scripts: a script is an organized body of information about some action, event, or procedure, general idea of how something should play out, the rules governing events and their sequence Ex: have script for how to eat in a restaurant Rules, schemata, and scripts are useful shortcuts to simplify your understanding, remembering, and recalling information about people and events

5 Chapter 3 01/24/2012 They enable you to generalize, make connections, and profit from previously acquired knowledge May mislead you distortion of memory, forgetting, mixing up Stage 3: Interpretation Evaluation Interpretation evaluation step in your perception is influenced by your experiences, needs, wants, values, beliefs about they way things are or should be, expectations, physical and emotional state, etc, also influenced by your rules, schemata, scripts, gender, etc. o Ex: meeting a college football player you put him through your perceptions Judgments about members of other cultures are usually ethnocentric because your schemata and scripts are created on the basis of your own cultural beliefs and experiences leads to intercultural misunderstandings Stage 4: Memory Your perceptions and their interpretations are put into memory; they are stored so that you may ultimately retrieve them at some later time You may readily store some information over others because they are consistent with your schema Depending on strength of your schema, it may be more or less resistant to change Stage 5: Recall Recall stage involves accessing information you have stored in memory You may recall information with a variety of inaccuracies: o Likely to recall info consistent with your schema (maybe not even real facts, just things consistent with your schema), may fail to recall info that is inconsistent with your schema, may recall info that is drastically inconsistent with schema therefore rethinking schema

6 Chapter 3 01/24/2012 Section 3: Impression Formation Impression formation (aka person perception): consists of a variety of processes that you go through in forming an impression of another person Impression Formation Process Self fulfilling prophecy: a prediction that comes true because you act on it as if it were true Four steps: o o o o You make a prediction or formulate a belief You act towards the person as if that prediction or belief were true Because you act as if the belief were true, it becomes true You observe the effects on the person, and this strengthens your beliefs Can also be about yourself, which can be destructive Influences yours and others behavior so that it conforms to your prophecies may only be perception and not reality Implicit Personality Theory Everyone has a subconscious theory that says which characteristics of an individual go with other characteristics Implicit personality theory: the system of rules that tells you which characteristics go together Halo effect: if you believe a person has some positive/negative qualities, you re likely to infer that she or he also possesses other positive/negative qualities Perceptual Accentuation Perceptual accentuation: leads you to see what you expect or want to see, you magnify or accentuate what will satisfy your needs and desires Can lead you to perceive what you need or want to perceive rather than what is really there, and fail to perceive what you don t want to perceive Primacy Recency Primacy effect: what comes first exerts the most influence Recency effect: what comes last exerts the most influence

7 Chapter 3 01/24/2012 Initial information helps us form a schema for that person, once its formed we are likely to resist info that contradicts it Why first impressions are so important initial schema others form functions as a filter or a block for further info about you Consistency Consistency: main balance among perceptions or attitudes People expect certain things to go together Attribution of control In perceiving and especially evaluating other people s behavior, you frequently ask if they were in control of the behavior o If you feel a person was in control of negative behaviors, you will come to dislike them Must be cautious of several errors in this: Self serving bias: we take credit for the positive and deny responsibility for the negative Overattribution: tendency to single out one or two obvious characteritics of a person and attribute everything that person does to this one or these two characteristics Fundamental attribution error: we assess someone s behavior but overvalue the contribution of internal factors and undervalue the influence of external factors leads us to believe people do what they do based on their personality not their particular situation Increasing Accuracy in Impression Formation Analyze Impressions Recognize your own role in perception, understand your own biases Avoid early conclusions, formulate hypotheses to test against your observations, look for a variety of cues pointing in the same direction Check Perceptions Perception checking: goal is to further explore the thoughts and feelings of the other person, not to prove that your initial perception is correct

8 Chapter 3 01/24/2012 Lessen your chances of misinterpreting another s feelings Two steps: o Describe what you see/hear as descriptively as you can o Seek confirmation: ask the other person if your description is accurate, avoid mind reading but avoid phrasing defensively or as if you already know the answer Reduce Uncertainty Observing someone what they are engaged in an active task, preferably interacting with others, will reveal a great deal You can sometimes manipulate situations so as to observe the person in more specific and revealing contexts Learn about a person through asking others Interact with the person, disclosing info about yourself sometimes helps Increase Cultural Sensitivity Cultural sensitivity: recognizing and being sensitive to cultural differences will help increase accuracy in your perception Will help counteract the difficuly most people have in understanding the nonverbal messages of people from other cultures

9 Chapter 3 01/24/2012 Section 4: Impression Management: Goals and Strategies Impression management: the process your go through to communicate the impression you want others to have of you The impression you make on others is largely the result of the messages you communicate (verbal and nonverbal) Must understand and be able to manage the impressions you give to others, mastering this will allow you to present yourself as you want others to see you To be Liked: Immediacy and Affinity Seeking Strategies Immediacy strategies: creation of closeness Affinity seeking strategies: will increase your chances of being liked Flattery has been found to increase chances of many good things Using these strategies too often may make you appear insincere To be Believed: Credibility Strategies Credibility strategies: seeks to establish your competence, your character, and your charisma Risk being perceived as too eager To Excuse Failure: Self Handicapping Strategies Self handicapping strategies: less extreme involves coming up with excuses for failure and having them ready in case you do, in extreme cases you actually set up barriers or obstacles to make the task impossible so that when you fail, you won t be blamed Risk leading people to believe you are incompetent or foolish To Secure Help: Self Deprecating Strategies Self deprecating strategies: you want to be taken care of or protected, confessions of incompetence and inability often to bring assistance from others

10 Chapter 3 01/24/2012 May convince people you are as incompetent as you say you are To Hide Faults: Self Monitoring Strategies Self monitoring strategies: suppressing the negative parts of your image, you carefully monitor what you say or do Risk being seen as unwilling to reveal yourself or as dishonest To be Followed: Influencing Strategies Influencing strategies: to gain influence you may stress your knowledge, expertise, or your right to lead by virtue of position If you try and fail you will be seen as having less power than before you failed To Confirm Self Image: Image Confirming Strategies Image confirming strategies: you communicate to confirm your self image, you reveal aspects of yourself that confirm this image and you repress aspects of yourself that would disconfirm this image Risk being seen as too perfect to be real Knowledge of these impression management strategies will give you a greater number of choices for achieving such widely diverse goals Will also allow you to recognize that they may be used unethically and for less than noble purposes