Real Reference: A Study Tool
Now that you have finished reading this chapter, you can:
Describe how our personal perspective on the world influences our communication:
- Perception is the cognitive process that helps us make sense of the world (p. 36).
- Communication processing is how we gather, organize, and evaluate the information we receive (p. 37).
- Because we are constantly bombarded with information we must sift through it to determine what is important and what to remember (p. 37).
Explain how we use and misuse schemas when communicating with others:
- Schemas are mental structures we use to connect bits of information together (p. 37).
- Schemas function to help us understand how things work and decide how to act.
- Schemas evolve as we select new information and situations (p. 37).
- Interaction appearance theory explains how people change their perception of someone else as they spend more time together (p. 37).
- Schemas present four challenges that derail good communication. Mindlessness is a passive response to information. This can be corrected by mindfulness, which helps us focus on the task at hand. The challenge selective perception presents is that it allows bias to influence our thoughts. Undue influence allows other sources too much say (pp. 38–39).
Define the attributions we use to explain behavior:
- When we need to explain why someone says or does something in a manner that does not fit our schemas, we look to attributions (pp. 39–40).
- The fundamental attribution error explains our tendency to assume that another person’s wrong behavior stems from an internal flaw, whereas the self-serving bias attributes our own failures to external causes (p. 40).
- Improve your perceptions by verifying them, being thoughtful looking beyond first impressions, and questioning your assumptions (pp. 40–41).
Describe cultural differences that influence perception:
- Effective communication depends on understanding how diversity, the variables that make us unique, affects perception (p. 41).
- The failure to see beyond our own beliefs and circumstances, or cultural myopia, blinds us to alternative points of view (pp. 43–44).
- Stereotyping, or generalizing about people, limits our ability to see the individual and can lead to prejudice, ill will toward a particular group and a sense of one’s own superiority (pp. 44–45).
Identify how our self-concept—who we think we are—influences communication:
- We receive both direct and indirect evidence about the self.
- We are more willing to interact in situations where we feel we have strengths and where our self-concept is confirmed by others (p. 47).
- We compare ourselves to others, even idealized images in the media, according to social comparison theory—often to our own disadvantage (pp. 47–48).
- Self-esteem is how we feel about ourselves in a particular situation (pp. 48–49).
- Self-efficacy is the ability to predict our effectiveness in a communication situation. Inaccurate self-efficacy may lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby we change our behavior in ways that make our prediction more likely to come true (pp. 49–51).
- We assess our communication effectiveness through the lenses of self-actualization (high performance), self-adequacy (adequate performance), and self-denigration (poor performance) (pp. 53–54).
Describe how our cognitions about ourselves and our behavior affect our communication with others:
- Self-presentation is intentional communication designed to let others know about ourselves (pp. 55–57).
- The tendency to watch our environment and others in it for cues as to how to present ourselves is called self-monitoring (pp. 56–57).
- Sharing important information about ourselves is self-disclosure (pp. 57–58).
- We can more easily control presentation of self online than in face-to-face encounters but that doesn’t mean that everyone does it effectively (pp. 58–60).