Page 61 - Essentials of Human Communication

40 CHapTer 2 Perception of Self and Others

Analyze Impressions Subject your perceptions to logical analysis, to critical thinking.
Here are three suggestions:
● Recognize your own role in perception. Your emotional and physiological state will influ-
ence the meaning you give to your perceptions. A movie may seem hysterically funny
when you’re in a good mood but just plain stupid when you’re in a bad mood. Under-
stand your own biases. For example, do you tend to perceive only the positive in people
you like and only the negative in people you don’t like?
● avoid early conclusions. On the basis of your observations of behaviors, formulate
hypotheses to test against additional information and evidence; avoid drawing conclusions
that you then look to confirm. Look for a variety of cues pointing in the same direction.
The more cues point to the same conclusion, the more likely your conclusion will be cor-
rect. Be especially alert to contradictory cues that seem to refute your initial hypotheses.
At the same time, seek validation from others. Do others see things the same way you do?
If not, ask yourself if your perceptions may be distorted in some way.
● Beware of the just world hypothesis. Many people believe that the world is just: Good
things happen to good people (because they’re good) and bad things happen to bad peo-
ple (because they’re bad) (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2013; Hunt, 2000). Even when you
mindfully dismiss this assumption, you may use it mindlessly when perceiving and evalu-
ating other people. Consider a particularly vivid example: If a woman is raped in certain
cultures (e.g., in Bangladesh or Yemen), she is considered by many in that culture (cer-
tainly not all) to have disgraced her family and to be deserving of severe punishment—in
some cases, death. And although you may claim that this is unfair (and it surely is), much
research shows that even in the United States many people do blame the rape victim,
especially if the victim is male (Adams-Price, Dalton, & Sumrall, 2004; Anderson, 2004).

Check perceptions The process of perception checking is another way to reduce uncer-
tainty and to ensure that your initial impressions are more accurate. The goal of perception
checking is to further explore the thoughts and feelings of the other person, not to prove that
your initial perception is correct. With this simple technique, you lessen your chances of mis-
interpreting another’s feelings. At the same time, you give the other person an opportunity to
elaborate on his or her thoughts and feelings. Let’s take an example: Dolly and Jane have been
Facebook friends for several years and have been very supportive of each other. Recently
however, Dolly’s messages have become more critical, often negative. Jane wonders if she did
something wrong that offended Dolly or if something is wrong with Dolly. In using percep-
tion checking, Jane would seek to clarify the reasons for Dolly’s behavior, rather than simply
assume that her initial impression was correct. In its most basic form, perception checking
consists of two parts:
● Description/interpretation. The first step is to describe what you see or hear or read and
how you interpret the behavior. The descriptive part of this is that Jane sees that Dolly’s
messages have been unnecessarily negative. The interpretation part of this is that Jane’s
initial impressions are that she did something to offend Dolly or that something is wrong
with Dolly.
● Clarification. At this second step Jane would seek clarification. Jane would ask Dolly, in
one form or another, what’s going on. For example, Jane may simply say “What’s up? Your
posts seem different” or “You didn’t seem to like my last ten photos; did I do something
wrong?” The objective here is simply to find out what was going on with Dolly. Be careful
that your request for clarification does not sound as though you already know the answer.
Another way of checking your perceptions is to use “Galileo and the Ghosts,” a tech-
nique for seeing how a particular group of people perceives a problem, person, or situation
(DeVito, 1996). It involves two steps:

● Set up a mental “ghost-thinking team,” much as corporations and research institutes
maintain think-tanks. Select a team of four to eight people. These can be people you ad-
mire and know or historical figures such as Galileo or Steve Jobs, fictional figures such as