Chapter 3 Flashcards
A cognitive process through which one interprets one’s experiences and comes to one’s own unique understandings.
Perception
The means by which we gather, organize, and evaluate the information we receive.
Communication processing
The idea that schemas are socially constructed perceptions of reality
Social Constructivism
The argument that people change their opinion about the attributions of someone, particularly physical attractiveness, the more they interact with that person.
Interaction appearance theory
Name three challenges with schemas
- Mindlessness
- Selective Perception
- Distorted perception
A passive state in which the communicator is a less critical processor of information, characterized by reduced cognitive activity, inaccurate recall, and uncritical evaluation.
Mindlessness
The process of being focused on the task at hand—necessary for competent communication.
Mindfulness
Active, critical thought resulting in a communicator succumbing to the biased nature of perception.
Selective perception
Personal characteristics that are used to explain other people’s behavior.
Attributions
When we attribute it to the situation (or something outside the person’s control), that is an
external attribution
When we attribute behavior to someone’s personality (or something within the person’s control), we call that an
internal attribution
The tendency to overemphasize the internal and underestimate the external causes of behaviors we observe in others.
Fundamental attribution error
The idea that we usually attribute our own successes to internal factors while explaining our failures by attributing them to situational or external effects.
self-serving bias
Inaccurate perception occuring when an individual focuses on the negative over positive or neutral attributes of another.
negativity bias
The act of organizing information about groups of people into categories so that we can generalize about their attitudes, behaviors, skills, morals, and habits
Stereotyping
