Your Reference
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. 30).
- Communication processing is the means by which we gather, organize, and evaluate the information we receive (p. 31).
- Because we are constantly bombarded with information in any situation, we must sift through it to determine what is important and what to remember (p. 31).
Explain how we use and misuse schemas when communicating with others:
- Schemas are mental structures we use to connect bits of information (p. 31).
- Schemas help us understand how things work and decide how to act; they evolve as we encounter new information and situations. Mindfulness helps us focus on the task at hand (p. 32).
- Schemas present three challenges that derail good communication: mindlessness, responding passively to information; selective perception, allowing bias to influence our thoughts; and undue influence, giving other sources too much say (pp. 32–33).
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 into our schemas, we look to attributions (p. 33).
- The fundamental attribution error explains our tendency to assume that another person’s wrong behavior stems from an internal flaw, while the self-serving bias attributes our own failures to external causes (p. 34).
- Interaction appearance theory explains how people change their perception of someone else as they spend more time together (p. 34).
Describe how cultural differences influence perception:
- Effective communication depends on understanding how diversity, the variables that make us unique, affects perception (p. 35).
- The failure to see beyond our own beliefs and circumstances, or cultural myopia, blinds us to alternative points of view (p. 36).
- 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 (p. 36).
Identify how our self-concept—who we think we are—influences communication:
- We are more willing to interact in situations where we feel we have strengths and where our self-concept is confirmed or changed by responses from others (pp. 37–38).
- We compare ourselves against idealized images in the media, according to social comparison theory , often to our own disadvantage (p. 38).
- Self-esteem relates to self-concept and is how we feel about ourselves in a particular situation (p. 39).
- Self-efficacy is the ability to predict, based on self-concept and self-esteem, 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. 40–42).
- We assess our communication effectiveness through the lenses of self-actualization (positive feelings about a highly successful performance), self-adequacy (satisfied or determined feelings about an adequate performance), and self-denigration (negative and destructive feelings about a poor performance) (pp. 42–43).
Describe how our cognitions about ourselves and our behavior affect our communication:
- Self-presentation is intentional communication designed to show elements of self for strategic purposes; it’s how we let others know about ourselves (pp. 43–44).
- The tendency to watch our environment and others in it for cues as to how to present ourselves in particular situations is called self-monitoring (pp. 44–45).
- Sharing important information about ourselves, such as with a close friend, is self-disclosure (pp. 45–47).
- We can more easily control presentation of self online than in face-to-face encounters (pp. 47–48).