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Psychology of Communication: perception
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Psychology of Communication: perception
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How do we decide what another person is like? Since this is a question of how we attribute personality traits, motives and abilities to other people, the theories around how we do this are known as attribution theory.
There has over the years been intense investigation of the process of attribution. One of the most recently developed perspectives is that of Hilton and Slugoski (1986) who argue that we make attributions to the information that seems to stand out, is abnormal in the context. Schneider (1995) takes the example of Janice going to a restaurant:
There is much evidence that we tend to attribute our own behaviour to the situation and others to their dispositions. This has come to be known as the fundamental attribution error. Though our attempts to explain people's actions in that way may sometimes lead us into error, it doesn't seem to me that the attempt to do so is fundamentally misguided:
Our minds explain other people's behaviour by their beliefs and desires because other people's behaviour is in fact caused by their beliefs and desires. The behaviourists were wrong and everyone intuitively knows it.
Pinker (1998) 329
Anderson ((1981) cited in Schneider (1995)) proposes that our judgments of other people are weighted averages of the information we have about them. In other words, in reaching decisions about other peoples personality, abilities and so on, we tend to take everything we know about them, giving some information a greater weight, and then produce an average of the information we have. Negative information will generally be given more weight than positive information.
The common adage that first impressions count is known technically as the primacy effect. Weighted averaging would explain this effect by saying that the information we get first is weighted more heavily because it is assumed to be more important.
It seems to be generally accepted as well (and perhaps somewhat paradoxically) that, if there is a time lag between the first piece of information and the next, then the last piece of information will carry more weight. This is known as the recency effect.
The notion that 'first impressions count' seems to be undermined by the result of an experiment carried out on Tomorrow's World on March 25 1995. In this experiment viewers saw a young man being interviewed for a job as an ambulanceman. He began by saying that he had been in the army medical corps and gave some description of relevant experience there. He ended by saying that he had not stayed long in any job since leaving the army. At least that was the version shown in the east of the UK. In the west, viewers saw the interview in reverse order, i.e. he stated first that he had not held any job long after leaving the army. In the west 54% of viewers voted that he had made a favourable impression; in the east only 45% voted that he had made a favourable impression - which seems to suggest that last impressions count.
We all have a number of general assumptions about what personality traits go together. This folk psychology is referred to as implicit personality theory. The likelihood is that we like to see positive characteristics going along with other positive ones - an effect known as the halo effect. This effect has been known since Thorndike first named it in 1920. He gave people a description of a fictitious person containing one or two positive traits. People then tended to see this fictitious person as having a whole lot more positive characteristics. The reverse holds true as well. The halo effect seems to be particularly powerful when we know relatively little about the person.
A schema (the plural is schemata) is pretty much the same as a perceptual set (see the section on Sets). It's important to bear in mind, though, that it is not only our visual perception which will be influenced by schemata, but also our perception of other people.
As you will have seen if you have looked at the other sections, perception is an active process of collecting data, formulating hypotheses about those data and testing the hypotheses against the data, probably in the light of new data, and making adjustments as appropriate: 'That's a tabby cat' 'Hang on, it's a very bigger tabby cat.' 'Blimey, it's a tiger!'
Perceptual sets help us because they shortcut the process. Interpreting the data in the light of what we already 'know' is clearly a lot more efficient than starting from scratch every time. In principle, at least - the reason the word 'know' is in inverted commas is that of course what we call 'knowledge' should perhaps more accurately be called 'belief'. If Afrikaners' beliefs lead them to differentiate two races only (see the section on Sets), that may well be efficient for them as long as they remain in power, but it doesn't do other races in their country much good.
What we refer to as a schema is set of beliefs about what people are like (therefore not much different from implicit personality theory above) and, beyond that, what certain types of people are like in certain circumstances. It may assist the speed of processing, but the problem is that it comes pretty close to stereotyping, so it's something you need to be aware of in your own interpersonal communication.
Hardy and Heyes (1979) take the example of riding a bike. If you can already ride a bike, your bike-riding schema contains the necessary elements and skills - balance, pedalling, steering, applying the brakes etc. To a certain extent, you can already ride a motorbike, then. But you'd have to learn something new - clutch control, changing gear etc. By a process known as 'accommodation', you'd have to modify the bike-riding schema to accommodate new skills. If you don't, you'll fall off or never get above 30mph. The same applies to our perception of other people: if we don't change the schemata we have to accommodate new people, new forms of behaviour, new ideas, we'll be doing other people a disfavour by stereotyping them and may be hampering communication between us. I have a fairly negative schema about people in suits. Somehow, it doesn't seem to matter how many of them I come across, I remain incapable of modifying the schema. That probably hasn't done my career much good as I tend to dismiss them as fairly unimportant, partly because of my belief that they see themselves as very important.
Schemata play an important rôle in persuasion. If that is of interest to you, take a look here.
Attitudes
Learning
Motivation
Personality
Selective attention
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