Chapter 3 Notes

Perception is ...... an active process of creating meaning by selecting, organizing, and interpreting people, objects, events,situations, and activities.

STEP 1: Selection:
Some qualities of external phenomena draw attention.
They are larger, more intense, or more unusual.
Change compels attention.
Our motives and needs affect what we see and don’t see.
Cultures also influence what we selectively perceive.

STEP 2: Organization
Constructivism
We organize and interpret experience by applying cognitive structures called schemata.
Prototypes
Personal constructs
Stereotypes
Scripts

Cognitive Schemata

Prototype: The most representative example of acategory
Personal Construct: Bipolar, mental yardstick we use to measure people and situations
Stereotype: Predictive generalization about individuals and situations based on the category into whichwe place them
Script: Guide to action in particular situations

Other Means For Organization of Perceptions
Ways in Which We Can Easily Categorize
Similarity
Closure
Proximity

STEP 3: Interpretation
The subjective process of explaining perceptions in ways that let us make sense of them.
Attributions are explanations of why things happen and why people act as they do.

Dimensions of Attributions

Attributional Errors
A self-serving bias: Is a bias to favor ourselves and our interests.
Allows us to avoid taking responsibility for negative actions and failures by attributing them to external, unstable, and specific factors that are beyond personal control.
The fundamental attribution error: Involves overestimating the internal causes of others undesirable behaviors and underestimating the external causes.

Influences on Perception
Physiology—differences in sensory abilities affect our perceptions. (We do not all hear, see, taste the same.)
Age—
The older we get the more complex set of experiences we have.
Time is different for different ages.
Age influences our perception of social life and its problems.

Culture consists of beliefs, values, understandings, practices, and ways of interpreting experience that are shared by a number of people.
Standpoint theory claims that we are affected not only by the culture as a whole, but by our particular location within the culture.
Standpoints reflect power positions in social hierarchies.

Influences on Perception
Cognitive Abilities—How we think about situations and people, and our personal knowledge of others.
Cognitive complexity is the number of constructs used, how abstract they are, and how elaborately they interact.
Person-centeredness is the ability to perceive another as a unique individual apart from social roles and generalizations based membership in groups.
Person-centeredness in not empathy which is the ability to feel with another.
Self—What we selectively perceive and how we organize and interpret phenomena are shaped by many aspects of our selves.

Implicit personality theory is unspoken and sometimes unconscious assumptions about how various qualities fit together in human personality.

Johari Window
Open Self
Blind Self
Hidden Self
Unknown Self