Chapter 4

The Process of Perception

1. Interpersonal Perception Defined
a. Perception: the process of making meaning from the things we experience in our
environment, and when we apply this process to people and relationship, we engage in
interpersonal perception.
i. Perception is a nonlinear process.
2. Three Stages of the Perception Processp
a. Selection
i. The process of perception begins when one or more of your senses are stimulated.
ii. Selection: The processes in which your mind and body help you choose certain
stimuli to attend to.
1. Base on the percentage of the things you take in a day the number of those
things we actually attend to is a very small percentage.
a. Its hard to attend to things that dont intrigue us or we dont view as
important.
b. We pay more attention to things that have salience (importance).
2. You dont necessarily make conscious decisions about which stimuli to notice
and which to ignore.
3. Three characteristics make a particular stimulus more likely to be selected
for attention.
a. Being unusual or unexpected makes a stimulus stand out.
b. Repetition, or how frequently youre exposed to a stimulus, makes it
stand out.
c. Intensity of a stimulus affects how much you take notice of it.
b. Organization
i. Organization: helps you make sense of the information by revealing how it is similar
to, and different from, other things you know about.
1. To classify a stimulus, your mind applies a perceptual schema to it, or a
mental framework for organizing information.
2. Four types of schema are used to classify (organize) information we
notice about other people:
a. Physical constructs emphasize peoples appearance
i. Notice objective (height, age) and subjective (physical
attractiveness) characteristics
ii. Also used to perceive graphic representations of people, called
avatars.
b. Role constructs emphasize peoples social or professional position.
c. Interaction constructs emphasize peoples behavior (based on first
impressions, past experiences, etc.).
d. Psychological constructs emphasize peoples thoughts and feelings.
3. Punctuation: the way we determine when events start and stop.
a. Also influences where we organize information.
c. Interpretation
i. Interpretation: the process of assigning meaning to information that has been
selected for attention and organized.
ii. Most of the time in our lives we compare people generally to the construct that we
place them in for that situation.
1. Very few people in our lives get their own schemata (personal construct).
iii. Three Factors That Affect Interpretation:
1. Personal Experience
2. Knowledge
3. Closeness
3. Influences of Perceptual Accuracy
a. Physiological States and Traits
i. Physiology: the study of the mechanical and biochemical ways in which our bodies
work. Influence comes and goes over time.
1. Ex: feeling tired can alter our perception of time and make us anxious. Or
being sick or hungry makes us grumpy and impatient, reducing our ability to
get along with others.
ii. Physiological States: conditions that are temporary.
iii. Physiological Traits: conditions that affect us on an ongoing basis. Traits vary from
person to person.
1. Perception relies a great deal on our senses, which help us perceive and
understand the world.
a. Ex: A sound that sounds just right to one person may be too loud for
another.
2. Biological Rhythm: the cycle of daily changes we go through in body
temperature, alertness, and mood.
b. Culture and Co-Culture
c. Social Roles
i. Social Role: a set of behaviors that are expected of someone in a particular social
situation.
1. These roles can also influence the accuracy of our perceptions.
2. Experience and occupational roles can also influence our perceptions of
others behaviors.

Fundamental Forces in Interpersonal Perception
1. Stereotyping Relies on Generalizations
a. Stereotypes: generalizations about a group or category of people that can have powerful
influences on how we perceive those people.
i. Stereotyping is impossible to avoid.
ii. Puts a high degree of confidence in our impressions.
b. Stereotyping is a three-part process:
i. Identify a group we believe another person belongs to.
ii. Recall some generalization others often make about the people in that group.
iii. Apply that generalization to the person.
c. Selective Memory Bias: describes the tendency to remember information that
supports our stereotypes and to forget information that does not.
d. Stereotyping underestimates the differences within a group.
2. The Primacy Effect Governs First Impressions
a. Primacy Effect: first impressions are critical because they set the tone for all future
interactions.
i. A study by Solomon Asch illustrates that the first information we learn about
someone tends to have a stronger effect on how we perceive that person than
information we receive later on.
1. A person described as intelligent, industrious, impulsive, critical, stubborn,
and envious was evaluated more favorably than one described as envious,
stubborn, critical, impulsive, industrious, and intelligent.
2. Primacy effect is powerful, but not unchangeable.
3. Recency Effect Influences Impressions
a. Recency Effect: says thats the most recent impression we have of someone is more
powerful than our earlier impressions.
4. Our Perceptual Set Limits What We Perceive
a. Perceptual Set: a predisposition to perceive only what we want or expect to perceive.
i. Influences how we make sense of people and circumstances.
1. Ex: An extremely religious person may perceive a medial healing as a miracle
or the answer to a prayer.
ii. Can shape the way we interpret social situations.
b. The face is such a fundamental tool for interpersonal recognition and communication that
we are led to recognize it in nearly any pattern that resembles it.
5. Egocentrism Narrows Our Perspective
a. Egocentric: the lacking of the ability to take another persons perspective.
i. According to Jean Piaget, egocentrism in a normal part of development for children
ranging from ages 2 to 6.
b. Altercentric: the ability to focus on the perspective of another person instead of your
own. This is the opposite of egocentric.
6. Positivity and Negativity Biases Affect Perception
a. Positivity Bias: The tendency to focus heavily on a persons positive attributes when
forming a perception.
i. We tend to see a few positive characteristics and then assign more positive
characteristics that we havent even seen yet. The same goes for negativity bias.
ii. Tends to happen in new romantic relationships.
b. Negativity Bias: The tendency to focus heavenly on a persons negative attributes
when forming a perception.
i. Particularly strong in competitive situations.

Explaining What We Perceive
1. Explaining Behavior Through Attributions
a. Attribution: an explanation for an observed behavior.
i. Locus: where the cause of a behavior is located
1. Internal: inside ourselves
2. External: outside ourselves
ii. Stability
1. A stable cause is one that is permanent, semi-permanent or at least easily
changed.
a. Ex: Rush hour traffic (external)
b. Ex: Roommate snapped because she is a mean person (internal)
2. An unstable cause is not permanent and can easily be changed.
a. Ex: Traffic accident (external)
b. Ex: Roommate snapped at you because she has the flu (internal)
iii. Controllability
1. If you make a controllable attribution for someones behavior, then you
believe that the cause of that behavior was under the persons control.
2. An uncontrollable attribution identifies a cause outside the persons control.
2. Recognizing Common Attribution Errors
a. Self-Serving Bias
i. Self-Serving Bias: tendency to attribute our successes to stable, internal
causes while attributing our failures to unstable, external causes.
1. Suggest our successes are deserved but our failures are not our fault.
2. Deals primarily with attributions that we make for our own behaviors.
a. However we often extend this tendency to other important people in
our lives positivity bias
b. Fundamental Attribution Error
i. Fundamental Attribution Error: we attribute other peoples behaviors to
internal rather than external causes.
1. This occurs especially if its a negative behavior and we dont know them
well.
c. Over Attribution
i. Over Attribution: we single out one or two obvious behaviors of a person and
then attribute everything he or she does to those characteristics.
1. Form of mental laziness
ii. Implicit Personality Theory: Over attributing based on an observed
personality trait.
Improving Your Perceptual Abilities
1. Being Mindful of Your Perceptions
a. Know Yourself
i. One part of being mindful of our perceptions is to ask how they are influenced by
your personal attributes.
b. Focus On Others Characteristics: The Influence Of Gender and Culture
i. Being mindful of our perceptions also means acknowledging how they are
influenced by characteristics of the people we perceive.
ii. People are more likely to perceive harassment when the supervisor is male as
opposed to female.
c. Consider the Context
i. An important part of being mindful of your perceptions, therefore, is to ask whether
there are pieces of information to which you didnt access.
1. Consider how the context it self influenced them.
a. Being aware of context helps mitigate positivity bias, negativity bias,
the recency effect, and primary effect.
2. Checking Your Perceptions
a. Separate Interpretations From Facts
i. Describing what you actually saw or heard is not the same thing as interpreting it.
ii. If we are to check the accuracy of our perceptions, we must start by separating what
we heard or saw from the interpretation we assigned it.
b. Generate Alternative Perceptions
i. Most people arrive at a perception and then pay attention only to information that
supports their perception, ignoring any information that doesnt.
ii. Once you have assigned meaning to an event, ask yourself what other meanings or
interpretations you might have come up with. This is important for two reasons:
1. It requires you to look at information about the situation that doesnt match
your original perception.
2. Generating alternative perceptions encourages you to ask yourself what
information you dont have that might be relevant.
c. Engaging in Perception-Checking Behaviors
i. Direct Perception Checking: involves asking other people if your perception of a
situation is accurate.
1. Involves three elements:
a. Acknowledging the behavior you witnessed.
b. Interpreting that behavior.
c. Asking whether your interpretation was correct.
2. Direct perception checking will be the most useful when you approach
people who are willing either to confirm your perceptions or to correct them.
ii. Indirect Perception Checking: involves listening and observing in order to seek
additional information about the situation.
1. There are instances when having more information makes your perception
less accurate.
d. Revise Your Perceptions As Necessary
i. When the results of perception checking give you reason to believe your perceptions
are inaccurate, its your responsibility as a communicator to revise them.
ii. Improving your perceptual ability therefore involves two major strategies:
1. You have to be mindful of the factors that influence what perception you
form of a situation.
a. Knowing yourself improves your perceptual ability by allowing
you to identify personal traits that influence your perception.
2. You have to check that perception by separating facts from interpretations,
considering alternative perceptions, engaging in direct and indirect
perception checking, and revising your perception if necessary.