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Unit 3 Decoding Messages: Perception, Information Processing and Listening

I. Notes

Message decoding is a cre­ative, highly selective process by which people assign meanings to communicative messages. This process is not as simple or as automatic as you might think. Decoding is often highly subjective. Different people exposed to a single mes­sage can come away with very different understandings, as the following true story shows.

A group of scientists attending a professional conference was waiting for a meeting to begin when a door opened and two men, one wearing a clown’s cos­tume and the other wearing a black jacket, red tie, and white trousers, rushed in. The two men yelled at each other and scuffled briefly. Suddenly a shot rang out, whereupon both men rushed out of the room. The chairperson immediately asked everyone in the room to write a complete description of what had hap­pened. The scientists did not know that the incident had been staged to test the accuracy of their perceptions.

How accurate were their perceptions? Of the forty scientists who respond­ed, none gave a complete description of the incident. Twelve reports missed at least fifty percent of what had happened, and only six reports did not misstate facts or add inaccurate details. The eyewitnesses could not even identify the color of the second man's suit; it was variously described as red, brown, striped, blue, and coffee-colored. In relating this story, William D. Brooks comments on the limitations inherent in perception:

Man does not perceive all he sees, nor does he necessarily perceive accurately what falls on the eye's screen; and yet his intrapersonal communication is limited to and based on the information he has via the process of perception from all the senses.

Despite the fact that decoding may be a fallible and risky business, accu­rate communication is possible. By understanding how perception and infor­mation processing work, you can improve your sending and receiving skills.

What Is Perception?

Perception is a social, cognitive process whereby indi­viduals assign meaning to raw sense-data. It is cogni­tive because it involves mental effort, and it is social because the categories used to process information are shared with others and are validated by social consensus. People engaged in perception use social knowledge to make sense of the world.

Imposing Order and Meaning on the World

Perception is a very active process. As we perceive, we do more than simply record the world: we actively organize it. The world comes to us first as an undifferentiated stream of sensations. We ignore some of these sensations and at­tend to others. When stimuli capture our attention, we label and categorize them, giving them stability and structure and relating them to past experiences.

Using Cognitive Schemata

Psychologists agree that in order to recognize objects and follow sequences of actions, we must possess internal representations of these objects and se­quences. These mental guidelines are called schemata, and they help us identify and organize incoming information. When we encounter a perceptual object, we store its image in short-term memory while we search for a schema that makes sense of it. I, for example, have a “Who wants to be a millionaire” schema. Having seen the show many times, I know the usual plot. If you have never seen the show, you must work out your own understandings, although a general quiz-show schema can help you make sense of the format. If you were from a culture without TV, however, you would lack the interpretive schemata needed to understand the conventions we take for granted. Schemata make pro­cessing rapid and effortless, although, as we shall see, they can sometimes dis­tort perception.

Some events or objects are easily encoded into existing schemata, whereas others force us to create new schemata or to modify old ones. We have sche­mata for physical objects, types of people (including ourselves), personal traits, relationships, and sequences of actions. The three most important types of schemata are person prototypes, personal constructs, and scripts.

Person Prototypes

We often use schemata to form impressions of other people. Person prototypes are idealized representations of a certain kind of person. For example, you may have a prototypical image of a professor, an extrovert, and a beauty queen. These images allow you to identify whether or not a given person belongs in one of these categories.

The human need to categorize others is very strong. When we encounter someone who doesn’t fit neatly into a category, we feel off balance. The information contained in prototypes consists of traits, patterns of be­havior, and role relations that fit our idea of a certain type of person.

Prototypes affect communication. We are likely to communicate openly with people who fit positive prototypes and to reject those who fit negative proto­types. Although prototypes are absolutely necessary if we are to process information about people, they can be unfair and simplistic. If our prototypes are inaccurate or incomplete, we mis­judge those around us. Only if we are willing to revise prototypes and to keep an open mind can we prevent these perceptual mechanisms from leading to prejudice.

Personal Constructs

In our daily interactions we often use another kind of schema called a personal construct. Personal constructs are the characteristics we notice on a daily basis about others. Whereas prototypes are global categorizations, constructs are spe­cific descriptors. Personal constructs belong to us rather than to the person we are judging. Lisa and Jim, for example, have a mutual friend Toby. To Lisa, Toby is generous, easygoing, and somewhat insecure. To Jim, Toby is sloppy, a lazy thinker, and somewhat mean-spirited. The adjectives each uses to describe Toby are examples of personal constructs. And examining these constructs tells us not only about Toby but about Lisa and Jim as well.

Personal constructs are called personal because we carry them around and use them to describe our social worlds. Out of the hundreds of characteristics that can be attached to another human being, we tend to use only a few. Some of them are suggested to us by recent events (if we have been studying the latest political scandal, con­structs such as “manipulative” may occur to us), others are our habitual ways of judging people. Constructs that are important to us and that we frequently use, regardless of circumstances, are called chronically accessible constructs, and these constructs are likely to color and bias our judgments. Two people may “pick up very different information about a third person, and interpret the same infor­mation in very different ways.” Chronically accessible constructs often auto­matically affect the judgments and decisions we make about other people. I may judge others in terms of their physical appearance, you may judge others in terms of their openness and honesty, and yet a third person may notice only how successful or ambitious others are. Each of us sees what is important to us, and we may miss what others see. We may therefore be biased in our percep­tions. As chronic constructs operate outside of our control and aware­ness and we cannot adjust for them through some intentional and controlled process, they can lead to perceptual problems.

To examine your own personal constructs, consider a number of people you know and write down adjectives to describe them. Looking at your com­pleted list, you’ll see the kinds of judgments you habitually make about others. Are the constructs you listed based on physical or psychological characteristics? Are they fair or unfair? What do they tell you about how you evaluate people?

When individuals use only simple, undifferentiated constructs based mainly on physical characteristics, we say that they lack cognitive complexity. Cognitive complexity occurs when an individual has a large, rich, and varied set of personal constructs. The cognitively complex person is willing to com­bine seemingly contradictory characteristics in creative ways, realizing that people are not all good or all bad.

Scripts

A third kind of schema is called a script. Scripts are schemata for action sequences. If we experience a situation repeatedly, we abstract its essential fea­tures and identify the order in which things happen. We have scripts for all kinds of simple actions: eating in a restaurant, greeting people in passing, working out at a gym, walking to class. Scripts allow us to behave effortlessly, without having to think much about what to do next. When we find ourselves in highly scripted situations, we feel confident. When we encounter unusual or novel situa­tions for which we have no script, we feel uncomfort­able and unsure of ourselves.

Scripts, then, allow us to interact mindlessly, almost as though we were on automatic pilot. When we perform familiar, well-practiced behaviors such as driving to work, we need not pay close attention to what we are doing. As we drive, we can think of the day ahead or work out a personal problem, and we may find ourselves at the office without really knowing how we got there. (Oc­casionally, in fact, we may end up at the office even though we had intended to go somewhere else, simply because we were following a script.)

Overcoming Mindlessness

As the example of driving to the office shows, we often process information au­tomatically, without much conscious thought. We frequently act like “lazy organisms”, saving our conscious attention for important situations and spending much of our time in what is called mindless or auto­matic processing. We process mindlessly when we rely on old routines and mental habits to give us information about the world.

Mindless processing has its advantages. If our schemata match reality, mindless processing can be adaptive and efficient. Indeed, without some kind of automatic processing, the amount of attention we would have to use for sim­ply getting through a day would overwhelm us. On the other hand, mindlessness has serious disadvantages. When we accept fa­miliar schemata uncritically, we give up control over our decisions and behav­iors. We can be easily influenced to do things we might not do otherwise and see things that aren’t there.

The opposite of mindless processing is mindful processing. When we are mindful we actively think about our world, controlling it rather than being controlled by it. When we act mindfully, we can overcome auto­matic assumptions and biases. By expending a little effort, we may be able to override automatic processing and achieve more control over perception.

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