Chapter 6 Outline

  1. Chapter 6
  2. The process of perceiving and interpreting the social world is a complex process that affects communication. Perception is affected by emotions, motivations, and social-cognitive norms.
    1. Emotional states shape and facilitate our perceptions by guiding attention and affecting memory.
      1. When strong emotional are experienced during an encounter, they amplify our memory of that encounter.
      2. We often match our memories to our emotions, retrieving happy memories when we are happy and sad memories when we are sad.
    1. Individual motivations also influence how we perceive and interpret interactions.
      1. Motivations can affect us without our being aware of them.
      2. Motivations can automatically affect attention, judgment, and action.
      3. Motivations that are primed in one context can influence perceptions in other seemingly unrelated social contexts.
    1. Schemata such as scripts and stereotypes also have a dramatic influence on how we perceive people and social events.
      1. Rather than painstakingly processing every detail of social experience, our brains are structured to rely on socially learned categories of thought that fill in details.
      2. The principle of least effort reflects this tendency to rely on cognitive schemata more than on the actual details of a given situation.
      3. Understanding social cognition is necessary because cognitive schemata affect us in several ways.
        1. They affect how we receive and interpret the messages of others.
        2.  They guide our actions in response to others.
        3. By questioning their appropriateness, we can assert control over the perceptual process.
        4.  As we communicate, we alter the content of our social cognitions.
  3. We use a variety of cognitive schemata to guide perception.
  4. Personal constructs allow us to identify the characteristics of persons, places, and social events.
  5. Person prototypes are used to classify and label people.
  6. Stereotypes offer us expectations about how a member of a social or cultural group is likely to act.
  7. Role and relationship schemata tell us the rules, norms, or patterns of interaction we associate with a given role or relationship.
  8. Self-schemata serve as expectations and guides for how we will or should act towards others.
  9. Event schemata, such as scripts and situational definitions, provide us with guidelines for how we should behave in particular circumstances.
  10. Interpersonal success depends on our ability to evaluate schemata critically and process information carefully.
  11. Attending to information about social situations can enhance communication.
    1. Identifying and recognizing different types of social episodes lets us know what kinds of communication are called for.
    2. Questioning the value of typical social scripts and patterns can allow us to act creatively.
    3. Recognizing that situational forces are often invisible to us is an important step to becoming more mindful.
  12. Forming accurate and fair impressions of others is an essential part of communication competence.
      1. In employing personal constructs to describe others, it’s important to use interaction as well as physical, role, and psychological constructs.
      2. Recognizing the fact that implicit personality theories can be false can improve communication.
    1. Because of the primacy effect, we are biased toward first impressions and often fail to adjust them as we observe new behavior.
  13. Being mindful of how our sense of self and our relational expectations affect communication is important.
    1. Self-monitoring, or adapting one’s sense of self to be more appropriate to both the situation and relationship, is a communication-related skill.
    2. Being attentive to the relational definitions we create can improve communication.
    3. Relationship prototypes and master contracts offer us instructions for interaction.
  14. Critically examining the attributions we make about the causes of behavior can improve communication.
    1. According to attribution theory, the causes of behaviors can be seen as situationally- or personality-based.
    1. Initial situational or personality attributions can be adjusted by employing discounting or augmenting rules.
    1. Our attributions are often biased.
      1. The tendency to bias attributions by making first impressions lasting is called the anchoring effect.
      2. The tendency to overestimate personality when making attributions about others reflects our cultural tendency to champion individualism.
      3. The counterpart of overestimating personality is underestimating situation.
      4. There is a tendency for people to be self-serving in their attributions by providing situational accounts for their own negative behavior while being less generous toward others.
  15. We are often overconfident in the accuracy of our perceptions of others.
  16. Because we rely so heavily on cognitive schemata, we tend to be naive realists, believing that what we perceive is always accurate.
  17. 1. One reason we take our perceptions at face value is that doing so allows us to act quickly on the basis of limited, incomplete information.
  18. 2.  Another reason for naïve realism is that we internalize the beliefs of those around us.
  19. Not all information processing is schematic; we sometimes attend to data in more mindful ways. Dual-processing theories describe this process.
    1. Initially, during attention and identification, we notice and categorize objects or people.
      1. We begin by attending to particularly salient features that are intense, novel, sudden, or changing.
      2.  Processing is likely to remain mindless unless the perceiver has a self-relevant reason for evaluating the situation in a more data-driven manner.
    2. During controlled processing, perception may become more nuanced but not completely unique or data-driven. Although perceivers are more mindful, they still rely on preexisting social categories.
    3. Finally, during personalization, the perceiver becomes actively involved in organizing information around the unique person, free of stereotypes or other categorical expectations.
  20. V.  Mindfulness is a skill that is necessary for interpretive competence.
  21. Unlike open-mindedness, which is a long-term personality characteristics, mindfulness is a momentary state of lively alertness.
  22. Although many people assume that being mindful is effortful, this is not the case.
  23. There are several ways to become more mindful.
    1. To increase mindfulness, communicators should become more aware of the fact that perception is socially determined.
    2. Awareness of the contextual triggers that govern behavior can increase mindfulness.
  24. 3  Asking ourselves why we are taking an action can enhance mindfulness.
  1. Critical examination of old habits as well as attempts to seek out new solutions can enhance mindfulness.
  1. Communicators can become more mindful by avoiding self-censorship and premature cognitive commitment.
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