Chapter 4-Perception In Interpersonal Communication

This chapter examined perception, a fundamental process in all interpersonal communication encounters, and looked at the stages you go through in perceiving people, the processes that influence your perceptions, and some of the ways in which you can make your perceptions more accurate. Stages of Perception What is perception and how does it work?

• Perception is the process by which you become aware of objects and events in the external world.
• Perception occurs in five stages: (1) stimulation, (2) organization, (3) interpretation-evaluation, (4) memory, and (5) recall.

Perceptual Processes

What influences your interpersonal perceptions?

• Your implicit personality theory allows you to conclude that certain characteristics go with certain other characteristics.
• Your self-fulfilling prophecy may influence the behaviors of others.
• Perceptual accentuation may lead you to perceive what you expect to perceive instead of what is really there.
• Perceptions may be affected by primacy-recency. Your tendency to give extra importance to what occurs first (a primacy effect) may lead you to see what conforms to this judgment and to distort or otherwise misperceive what contradicts it. First impressions often serve as filters, as schemata, for more recent information. In some cases, you may give extra weight to what occurs last (a recency effect).
• The tendency to seek and expect consistency may influence you to see what is consistent and to not see what is inconsistent.
• A stereotype, a fixed impression about a group, may influence your perceptions of individual members; you may see individuals only as members of the group instead of as unique individuals.
• Judgments of attribution, the process through which you try to understand the behaviors of others (and your own behaviors, in self-attribution), particularly the reasons or motivations for these behaviors, are made on the basis of consensus, consistency, distinctiveness, and controllability. Errors of attribution include the self-serving bias, overattribution, and the fundamental attribution error.

Increasing Accuracy in Interpersonal Perception

How might you increase your accuracy in perception?

• Perceive critically: For example, recognize your role in perception, avoid early conclusions, and avoid mind reading.
• Check your perceptions; describe what you see or hear and ask for confirmation.
• Reduce uncertainty: For example, by lurking before actively participating in an Internet chat group, collecting information about the person or situation, interacting and observing the situation.
• Be culturally sensitive; recognize the differences between you and others and also the differences among people from another culture.

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