Perception

 Selection: you can’t attend to everything. Most things are not relevant. You will play attention to things based on certain factors: things that stand out, changes, your motives, your expectations, and your culture.  Selective exposure: you expose yourself to information that reinforces, rather than contradicts, your beliefs or opinions.  Selective attention: focus on certain cues and ignore others.  Selective perception: see, hear, and believe what you want to see, hear, and believe.  Selective retention: you remember things that reinforce your beliefs rather than contradict them.

 We use prototypes (clearest examples of something, personal contrast (mental yardsticks of a person’s quality), stereotypes, and scripts.  Figure (the focal point of your attention) and Ground (the background).  Closure: the tendency to fill in missing information to complete a figure or statement.  Proximity: objects physically close to one another will be perceived as a group.  Similarity: elements are grouped together because they seem similar.

 We also use it to explain the actions of others through attribution errors, self-serving bias.  Interpretive perception: a blend of internal states and external stimuli.  Attribution errors: attribute someone’s success to a situation and their failure to personality.  Self-serving bias: attribute our own success to personality and failure to the situation.

 Physiology: depends on how acute our senses are; medical conditions, age.  Past Experiences and roles: training we receive, demands of a role, professional and social roles influence our interpretation.  Culture and Co-Culture: social groups; POV shaped by material, social, symbolic conditions common for members of a group; race, gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality.  Present Feelings and circumstances: your mood at that moment.  Self: how we view ourselves affects how we view others.

 Stereotyping: generalizations; predict what other people will do; based on perceptions of similarities; may be accurate or inaccurate; need them.  First Impressions: as little as 3 seconds; the “four minute rule”; lots of nonverbal communication; compare others to ourselves.  Self-fulfilling prophecy: the idea that you behave and see yourself in ways that are consistent with how others see you.

 Maslow’s Hierarchy  Physical Needs: Rely on communication to survive and thrive.  Safety Needs: communication used to protect us from danger and harm.  Belonging Needs: communication used to ensure we are part of something.  Self-Esteem Needs: valuing and respecting ourselves and being valued and respected by others. Who we are and can be can come from images of ourselves and how others communicate with us.  Self-Actualization: use our talents, thrive on growth, enlarge our perspectives. The fulfillment of one’s potential as a person. The more self-actualized we become the more we want to be even stronger.

 The picture you have of yourself; the sort of person you believe you are.  The self is a process that develops and changes.  You receive confirmation, rejection or disconfirmation.  Self-Esteem:  How well you like and value yourself; the feeling you have about your self-concept.

 Commitment to personal growth.  Gain and use knowledge to support personal growth.  Set goals that are realistic and clear.  Seek contexts that support personal change.

 The control (or lack of control) of the communication of information through a performance.  There are high self-monitors (highly aware of their management behavior) and low self-monitors (little attention to the responses of their messages).  Face: the socially approved and presented identity of an individual.  Facework: verbal and nonverbal strategies used to help others maintain a their own image of you.  Politeness: efforts to save face for others.