Transcript A First Look at Interpersonal Relationships

Perception: What You See is
What You Get
Chapter Summary
•The Perception Process
•Influences on Perception
•Common Tendencies in Perception
•Perception Checking
•Empathy and Communication
•The Pillow Method
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The Perception Process
The Four Steps
•Selection
•Organization
•Interpretation
•Negotiation
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The Perception Process
Selection
•What attracts your attention?
•Stimuli that are intense attract us.
•You are more likely to remember items that stand out:
•Tall or short people
•Items that excite your senses
•Unchanging people or things become less noticeable over time.
•If you’re running late, you’ll notice all the clocks around you.
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The Perception Process
Organization
After selecting information from the environment, we
must organize it in some meaningful way.
•What do you see?
•In this example there are only two
ways to organize the impression.
•In reality there are many more.
FIGURE 3.1
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The Perception Process
Organization
After selecting information from the environment, we
must organize it in some meaningful way.
In contrast to
Figure 3.1, how
many impressions
do you see here?
FIGURE 3.3
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The Perception Process
Organization
We classify people the same way we did in the examples.
•Appearance
•Male or Female, Beautiful or Ugly
•Social Roles
•Student, Teacher, Attorney
•Interaction Style
•Friendly, Helpful, Mean
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The Perception Process
Organization
•Psychological Traits
•Curious, Nervous, Insecure
•Membership
•Republican, American, Democrat
•How you’ve classified someone will change the
way you react to them in the future.
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The Perception Process
Organization
•Stereotyping
•After we’ve chosen an organizing scheme to classify people, we
use that scheme to classify similar groups.
•Exaggerated generalizations lead to stereotyping.
•After a stereotype is created, we seek out isolated
behavior to support these inaccurate beliefs.
•Decategorize those you stereotype.
•Treat them as individuals.
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The Perception Process
Organization
•Punctuation
•How arguments are punctuated can lead to a variety of problems
FIGURE 3.4
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The Perception Process
Interpretation
Interpretation plays a role in every interpersonal act.
•Degree of involvement with the other person
•We treat people differently when pursuing a relationship.
•Past experience
•Have you been in the situation before?
•Assumptions about human behavior
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The Perception Process
Interpretation
Interpretation plays a role in every interpersonal act.
•Attitudes
•The attitudes we hold shape the way we view others.
•Expectations
•Anticipation shapes interpretation.
•Knowledge
•Knowledge of a situation will change your interpretation of it.
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The Perception Process
Interpretation
•Self-Concept
•How you view yourself will alter your interpretation.
•When you’re feeling down, the world looks much worse.
•Relational Satisfaction
•Positive behavior may be viewed as negative depending on your
current satisfaction in a relationship.
•It is possible for each section of the perception process to
occur out of order.
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The Perception Process
Negotiation
•Our personal worlds are described as narratives:
•Ask two children what they’re fighting about.
•Chances are you’ll get different narratives.
•When narratives coincide, they are said to be shared:
•These narratives do not have to be true to be powerful.
•In some cases couples have a happy relationship simply because
they share the narrative that they’ve always had one.
•Negotiating each narrative can be tricky.
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Influences on Perception
Physiological Influences
•The Senses
•How each of us experience our senses changes the way we
interact and shape our perceptions.
•How many times have you heard someone complain about the
temperature and you thought it was just fine?
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Influences on Perception
Physiological Influences
•Age
•Experience changes the way one perceives the world.
•Biological factors also shape perception.
•Health
•When you’re feeling sick, your perception of the world changes.
•Fatigue
•Just as being ill can have harmful effects on your relationship so
can being sleepy.
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Influences on Perception
Physiological Influences
•Hunger
•People often get grumpy when they’re hungry.
•Several biological changes occur in the body.
•Biological Cycles
•Your body changes constantly throughout your daily cycle.
•Change can influence your perception positively and negatively.
•Psychological Challenges
•Mental illness and disorder can dramatically change the way one
interacts with and perceives the world.
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Influences on Perception
Cultural Differences
Each culture values different principles of communication.
•Collectivistic vs. Individualistic Culture
•Ethnocentrism
•The attitude that one’s own culture is superior to others
•Cultural differences can occur within a single country
•North vs. South
•East vs. West
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Influences on Perception
Social Roles
•Gender Roles
•Socially instructed ways men and women should act
•Violations to these rules is seen as unusual and undesirable.
•Occupational Roles
•Depends on level of experience
•Can change instantly when new people are added to the group
•Philip Zimbardo conducted the an experiment that popularized
the theory of occupational roles.
•Prisoners and Guards (PG 101-102)
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Common Tendencies in
Perception
How we Judge Ourselves
•We judge ourselves more charitably than others.
•Even when situations are similar, our tendency is to fault the other
person rather than admit we also made the same mistake.
•He wasn’t listening.
•He flies off the handle.
•What did you expect from someone who curses?
•Egocentric tendencies cause us to rate ourselves more
favorable than others.
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Common Tendencies in
Perception
Others’ Negative Characteristics
•We pay more attention to others’ negative
characteristics.
•To avoid bombarding our self-concept with doubt, we tend to
focus more harshly on the shortcomings of others.
•We are influenced by the obvious.
•Because we select stimuli that is most noticeable, it is not
surprising that obvious events tend to have the most impact.
•We assume that others are similar to us.
•Be careful when telling jokes and using slang.
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Common Tendencies in
Perception
Perception Checking
•Elements of Perceptions Checking
•A description of the behavior you notice
•At least two possible interpretations of the behavior
•A request for clarification about how to interpret the behavior
•Perception Checking Considerations
•Completeness
•Nonverbal Congruency
•Cultural Rules
•Face-Saving
•Can be a way to raise an issue without directly threatening
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Common Tendencies in
Perception
Empathy and Communication
•Empathy
•The ability to re-create another person’s perspective or to
experience the world from his/her point of view
•Perspective Taking
•The attempt to take on the viewpoint of another
•Requires a suspension of judgment
•Sympathy
•You view the other person’s position from your point of view.
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Common Tendencies in
Perception
The Pillow Method
•The Pillow Method is a tool for building empathy.
•The Pillow Method consists of four sides or positions.
FIGURE 3.5
The Pillow Method
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Perception: What you see is
what you get
Chapter Summary
•The Perception Process
•Influences on Perception
•Common Tendencies in Perception
•Perception Checking
•Empathy and Communication
•The Pillow Method
Looking Out, Looking In
12th Edition
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