Chapter 2
PERCEPTION
AND
COMMUNICATION
TOPICS
The process of human perception
 Influences on perception
 Social media and perception
 Guidelines for improving perception and
communication

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.
focuses on meaning, which is the heart of
communication
 we need to understand the reciprocal relationship
between perception and communication.
 as we will see, perception shapes the meaning we
assign to others’ communication and how we ourselves
communicate.
 At the same time, communication influences how we
perceive people and situations.

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.
Instead, we actively work to make sense of
ourselves, others, and interactions.



we select only certain
things to notice,
we organize
interpret what we
have selectively
noticed.
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

ORGANIZATION

Constructivism – we organize and interpret
experience by applying cognitive structures called
schemata
Prototype
 Personal construct
 Stereotype
 Script

INTERPRETATION


The subjective process of explaining our
perceptions in ways that make sense to us
Attributions
Locus
 Stability
 Specificity
 Responsibility

INTERPRETATION CONTINUED

Attributional Errors
Self-serving bias
 Fundamental attribution error

INFLUENCES ON PERCEPTION
Physiology
 Age
 Expectations
 Culture



Social location
Roles
INFLUENCES ON PERCEPTION CONTINUED

Cognitive abilities
Cognitive complexity
 Person-centeredness


Self
IMPLICIT PERSONALITY THEORY

A collection of unspoken and sometimes
unconscious assumptions about how various
qualities fit together in human personalities
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

THE LADDER OF ABSTRACTION