Human Communication: Week 2 - 9 Sept 2014 (Tue)

Today, we had a lecture about PERCEPTION

Perception is one's first impression given to others. It is the first image u think about in your heart.

Well, there are 3 process/stages to take place when perception happens

1. Sensory stimulation occurs
2. Sensory stimulation is organised
3. Sensory stimulation is interpreted-evaluated

These can be explained in a very scientific manner.

For an example, u saw a girl screaming at a guy on the street.

When you saw them, you were undergoing first stage. (The light travels into your eyeballs)

Then, your brain would start gathering and organizing the information based on various principles. For example, according to proximity principle, you will automatically categorize are a couple or something else because you see both of them as a unit.

Then, you would think of something like "wow, this guy is so handsome!! He is a nice and polite person." or "eww, this ugly girl so ugly and unrespectful to his handsome boyfriend. She is a bad girl, don't even know how to appreciate her boyfriend". When you are doing this, you are trying to evaluate and interpret them in your mind. Perception happened.

Perception could be affect by 5 factors. They are called process influencing perception:

1. Implicit Personality Theory: We tend to categorize people into positive and negative. So, if one shows positive characteristic or personality, we tend to think they would possess the other good traits and vice versa. this effect is know as Halo Effect(positive traits) and Reverse Halo Effect(for negative traits). From the example above, we tend to thinks that the handsome boy is a good guy(Halo effect takes place) while the ugly girl is bad inconsiderate girl(Reverse Halo Effect takes place).
2. Self-fulfilling prophecy: It is also known as Pygmalion effect: Basically, it is something you predicted to be happen, and you unconsciously acted as if it is true, therefore it happened as you predicted because you are the one who fulfilled it. For an example, you thinks that your lecturer don't like you (but he is not in the beginning), so you keep disturbing him when he is giving lecture, and because of your annoying disturbing action, you lecturer don't like you at the end. Your are the one who causes the situation happens.
3. Primacy-recency: we tend to percept something by experiences or early information. For an example, you heard that Kuala Lumpur is a very polluted city from somebody else. When you come to Kuala Lumpur, although the air is very clean, you will feel like "Eh how come the air so dirty one? everyday haze.. oh my god i cant breathe well at here lah, how come KL people can survive here ah?"
4. Consistency: We tend to have consistency among perceptions. Eg. if somebody always get full marks in exam, we will tend to think that he is very good in this subject, and we will expect him to get full marks in the next exam too.
5. Attribution: It is an process to discover why and how people do something.

However, perception is not always correct. Let's get back to the first example. you might think the girl is being arrogant to the handsome guy, but in fact, the guy might be a stranger who molested the girl and the girl is trying to catch others attention in order to stop the guy from being impolite to her.

So, how do we make perception precisely instead of keep making wrong perception?

There are few ways suggested:

1. Analyze your impression towards the matters you making perception
2. Look for more information to reduce the uncertainties
3. Increase sensitivity in different cultures to reduce misunderstanding
4. Always check your perceptions with the reality

Well this is all for today. Hope you enjoy reading them.