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CHAPTER 4
PERCEPTION
Objectives
After studying the material in Chapter Four of Looking Out/Looking In, you should understand:
1. Describe how the processes of selection, organization, interpretation, and negotiation shape
communication in a given situation.
2. Explain how influences on perception affect communication in a specific situation.
3. Analyze how common perception tendencies have distorted your appraisals of another
person, and hence your communication. Use this information to present a more accurate
alternative set of perceptions.
4. Demonstrate how you might use the skill of perception checking in a significant relationship.
5. Enhance your cognitive complexity by applying the “pillow method” in a significant
disagreement. Explain how your expanded view of this situation might affect your
communication with the other(s) involved.
Notes on Class and Student Activities
1. Your Perceptual Schema (MindTap Ch 4: The Perception Process - Pause and Reflect)
Objectives
To help students recognize the perceptual, physical, role, interaction, psychological, and membership
constructs that help them categorize others.
To encourage students to consider the validity of their constructs.
Instructions
Assign “Pause and Reflect” online activity questions as found at MindTap Ch 4: The Perception Process
- Pause and Reflect and follow up with discussion questions below.
Discussion Questions
1. How do constructs limit our perceptions of others?
2. How do constructs help us relationally?
3. How might your relationships might change if you used different constructs?
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2. Guarding Against Perceptual Errors (3.4 in Student Activities Manual)
Objective
Explain how the influences on perception listed in this chapter affect communication in a specific
situation.
Analyze how the tendencies described in this chapter have distorted your perceptions of another
person, and hence your communication. Use this information to present a more accurate alternative
set of perceptions.
Discussion Questions
1. Based on the observations above, how do you think these influences on perception affect your
understanding and attitudes about other people?
2. Reflecting on your observations, which of the influences on perception are the most apt to
provide you with inaccurate perceptions?
3. What might you do in the future to guard against inaccurate perceptions of people?
2. Punctuation Practice (MindTap; CH4: The Perception Process - Skill Builder)
Objective
To help students discover the importance of punctuation in our perceptual organization.
Discussion Questions
1. In the examples, how might the different punctuating schemes affect the way each might respond
to the other?
2. How can you use the concept of punctuation to appreciate the perception of others?
3. Role Reversal (MindTap Ch 4: Influences on Perception -Pause and Reflect)
Objective
To give students the opportunity for firsthand experience with an orientation or perspective different
from his or her own.
Options
An effective warm-up is to have the class members name people, groups, or philosophical positions
they do not understand at all—which should provide each student with several targets for the
assignment. An alternate approach is to stage debates in which students are required to defend positions
opposed to their own. You might even want students actually to assume the role they’re playing, that
is, have conservatives pretend they’re radicals, children play parents, and so on. In many cases, you’ll
need to become the director to help students get into their roles. You may need to goad them into acting
out contrasting positions, play alter ego, or just plain put words into their mouths until they get the idea.
Discussion Questions
1. What were your expectations prior to the experience?
2. How did the experience meet your expectations? Were there any surprises?
3. Did the experience change your own perspective, orientation, or the way you feel toward others?
If so, in what ways?
4. How might this experience affect future relations with people who hold different perspectives from
you?
5. Are there people whom you wish would take a walk in your shoes for a day? If so, who are they?
4. Perception-Checking Stimuli
Objectives
To enable students to understand the perceptions of others.
To provide situations where perceptions can be aired, discussed, and “perception checked.”
Instructions
Here are two activities designed for group interaction.
The Gender Game. Divide the class into men and women. Each group is to come up with 5–10
questions they have always wanted to ask the opposite gender but, for some reason or another, never
have. They are to rank their questions in importance because the class may not get to all the questions.
Two simple rules govern the limits here: (1) you may not ask a question of the opposite gender that you
are unwilling to answer yourself, and (2) you should avoid questions that are insulting (i.e., specific
sexual behaviors that might embarrass some class members) or that tend to generalize about all
members of a gender (e.g., “Why do women always go to the bathroom in pairs?”).
Groups meet face to face after about 20 minutes allotted to question-generation, and the instructor acts
as moderator as one “side” and then another asks one question at a time; each time the opposite side
can put the question back to them. The instructor should encourage all members of the class to answer
the question put to the group, but no one should be pressured if he or she feels uncomfortable.
The Intercultural Game. Using the same format as The Gender Game, this activity makes good use
of any diverse population your institution may have. If your class has members of many cultures, you
can divide them that way. Or, make use of foreign language classes or English as a Second Language
(ESL) classes, and coordinate your activity with another instructor. In addition to providing a forum
for perception checking, you can further interdisciplinary relationships at the same time.
Discussion Questions
1. What did you find out about the other gender (or about another culture) that you didn’t know
before?
2. Are your perspectives similar to or different from the others you interviewed?
3. What purpose did perception checking serve in this activity?
4. How do our perceptions influence communication with others? Give specific examples.
5. What effect might this activity have on future communication and relationships with people of the
opposite gender (or of another culture)? Suggest specific ways we can improve communication.
5. . Perception-Checking Practice
(MindTap Ch4:
Perception Checking – Apply
and 4.3 in Student Activities Manual)
Objective
To assist students in the application and analysis of perception checking in a variety of situations.
Discussion Questions
1. What aspects of perception checking are most/least useful?
2. What aspects of perception checking are the most challenging?
3. How can you use perception checking most effectively in your life?
6. Pillow Talk
(MindTap Ch4: Cognitive Complexity - Skill Builder, text, p. 107 and Shifting Perspectives, 4.2 in
Student Activities Manual)
Objective
To provide students with a systematic tool for exploring the perceptions of those who differ from them
on important issues.
Note 1. The pillow method is a culmination of the entire chapter. The measure of a student’s success in
understanding perceptual variability is the ability to move through the steps on a personal problem.
2. Working through the pillow becomes more difficult with the immediacy of the issue. You will most
likely want to work through several cases in class. You may need to suggest to students some
possible reasons for position 2, in which the “opponent” is right.
3. We urge you not to become discouraged when students say they “can’t” understand a position
different from their own. Although this kind of understanding is difficult, the reward of increased
empathy is well worth the effort.
Discussion Questions
1. What insights can we gain about the perspectives of others when we apply the pillow method?
2. Which positions on the pillow were the most challenging for you? Why? How can you might you
be able to assume those positions more effectively in the future?
3. How has empathy (or lack thereof) affected communication in your past and current relationships?
4. How might these insights affect future communication in your relationships?
6. Explore Your Perceptions
Objective
To illustrate the process and characteristics of students’ perceptions.
Instructions
1. Have students pair up with classmates they have not yet interacted with or met.
2. Ask them to greet each other, get each other’s names and then sit down across from each other and
3. Write the following (or similar) items on the board, and tell them that, without talking to each other,
they are going to guess these things about their partners (on paper):
• major in school
• job? If so, where?
• hometown
• mode of transportation
• favorite place to travel
• own pets? if so, which ones?
• favorite music
• favorite TV program
• several adjectives that describe his/her personality and style of interaction
4. After their guesses are complete, have them talk with their partners about unrelated subjects (what’s
the last movie they’ve seen, what they did last weekend or plan to do the next weekend) for about
3-4 minutes. Tell them to avoid the guessed subjects if possible.
5. After their conversations, have them change any of their guesses if they see a need.
6. Then, give them time to share and compare answers and keep track of how many they got right or
wrong (or partly right).
Discussion Questions
1. How many of you guessed more than half correctly? Less than half? Half?
2. What information did you use to base your guesses on (hairstyle, clothing, initial greeting, previous
behavior in classroom, people you know who look like your partner, your own preferences,
assumptions and generalizations about people)?
3. Did you change your answers after speaking? If so, why?
4. Which items were easiest to guess? Hardest? Why? What does someone look like that drives a
truck? Owns a cat?
5. Were there any surprises? Did you get any ideas about how others view you?
6. How did it feel to make these guesses about someone?
7. Do you make these assumptions in real life? These are fairly trivial pieces of information that we
attach meaning to. What are some other types of interpretations we make about people and their
behaviors?
8. How do the stages of perception (selection, organization, interpretation, negotiation) relate to this
exercise?
9. What lessons can we draw from this exercise?
7. Sexual Harassment and Perception (MindTap: Ch 4: Common Tendencies in Perception - On the Job)
Lead a class discussion based on this reading feature and questions below:
Discussion Questions
1. How might sexual harassment actually be defined by people in a variety of different roles (e.g.,
males, females, younger, older, cultures with high and low power distance)? What specific behavior
might constitute harassment for one but not for another?
2. Who gets to define “hostile work environment?” What problems exist when people don’t agree on
the definition? How can these be resolved?
8. Building Cognitive Complexity
Objective
To help students enhance their cognitive complexity.
To explore the uniqueness of perceptions.
To explore the negotiation part of the perception process.
To explore influences on perception in a specific situation.
Instructions
1. Do a Google search for interesting images of people in situations (such as “people at work”) and
project it onto the screen.
2. Put students in groups and have each group talk about the photo until they agree on what’s
happening in the photo. Have each group report to the class what they see in the photo.
3. After all groups have reported, hold a class discussion about other possibilities (if you think that all
possibilities haven’t been exhausted). Or choose another scene and have students brainstorm a long
list of possibilities for what’s happening in the picture.
Discussion Questions
1. How many people in your group had the same first impression of what was going on in the picture?
2. Were you able to come to an agreement about what was happening in the picture? If so, how quickly
and easily did you reach consensus? If not, why do you think you weren’t able to do so?
3. What factors do you think accounted for differences in perceptions?
4. How difficult or easy was it to come up with a long list of possibilities for what is happening in the
scene?
5. How does this activity illustrate the process of negotiation?
6. How does this activity relate to cognitive complexity?
7. Are there ways to carry this practice over into real-life perception situations? Explain.
9. Empathy Through Doing
Objective
To help students explore concrete ways to build empathy.
To explore the connection between empathy experiments and cognitive complexity.
To help students apply empathy in their own lives.
Instructions
1. Show a segment from the television program “Undercover Boss,” and/or discuss the Empathy
Experiment described in the text.
2. Have students brainstorm other ways to learn empathy through “doing” (e.g., learn what it’s like to
be visually impaired by rubbing Vaseline on your glasses, etc.).
Discussion Questions
1. Have your own perceptions been altered by similar “doing” activities or by “walking in someone’s
shoes?”
2. Do you agree or disagree with student Liz Delfing (from the Empathy Experiment reading) who
says the only way empathy can be learned is by doing experiments like the ones she participated
in? Explain.
3. How does “doing” relate to cognitive complexity?
Sample Quiz
1. Identical foods can actually taste different to various individuals.
2. We are influenced more by subtle stimuli rather than obvious ones.
3. The self-serving bias illustrates our tendency to judge others more charitably than ourselves.
4. The process whereby people influence each other’s perceptions and attempt to achieve a shared
perspective is called negotiation.
5. Studies have shown that sexual harassment complaints are rare today because most people agree on
their interpretations of what constitutes a “hostile work environment.”
6. The Pillow Method is designed to
a. persuade someone to accept your viewpoint.
b. settle a dispute.
c. minimize an issue.
d. gain insight into another’s viewpoint.
e. punctuate the cause and effect of an argument.
7. A perception check includes
a. a description of the behavior you have noticed.
b. two possible interpretations of the behavior.
c. a request for clarification about how to interpret the behavior correctly.
d. all of the above.
e. none of the above.
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8. What’s missing from this perception check? “When you didn’t call me when you said you would, I
thought you might have forgotten or were mad at me. What happened?”
a. It doesn’t describe behavior.
b. It has only one interpretation.
c. It doesn’t request clarification.
d. It is too wordy.
e. Nothing is missing from this perception check.
9. When Mary meets Ted at a party, she asks him what he does for a living. This is an example of
classifying people by
a. appearance.
b. psychological traits.
c. membership.
d. social role.
e. interaction style.
10. While on vacation with her family in Germany, Abigail criticized how Germans drove on the
Autobahn compared to American freeway driving. According to the text, Abigail’s attitude is
considered
a. prejudice.
b. ethnocentrism.
c. ethnicity.
d. punctuation.
INSTRUCTIONS for questions 11 - 15: Match each of the descriptions below with the term it best describes.
a. self-serving bias
b. stereotyping
c. sympathy
d. narrative
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11. You believe that most of the elderly are slow drivers.
12. You notice car advertisements more when you need a new car.
13. You tell your friend you’re sorry that he was robbed.
14. You claim your roommates are lazy when they don’t clean up, but when you fail to clean, it’s because
of your many commitments.
15. The stories you share with your coworkers creates a shared perspective of your boss.
1. Choose one of the following social roles—gender, occupational or relational—then explain how this
area has influenced your perceptions. Use examples from your own life in your discussion.
Answer: will vary Type: E Influences on Perception Application
17. Using the following problem, apply the Pillow Method to view the issue. Identify each position and
explain each position clearly in relation to the scenario. Explain how an expanded view of the
situation might affect the communication in this relationship.
Problem: You and a friend have talked about taking a trip to Europe after college graduation. While
planning the trip during senior year, you discover that your friend is insisting on taking an organized
tour while you have always dreamed of backpacking through Europe and staying at hostels.
Answer: will vary Type: E Cognitive Complexity Synthesis
18. How does the concept of self-fulfilling prophecy from Chapter 3 relate to the interpretation step in
the perception process? Give examples.
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Answer: will vary Type: E The Perception Process Synthesis
19. How can we use the information described in the section on “Common Tendencies in Perception” to
improve the accuracy of our perceptions?
Answer: will vary Type: E Common Tendencies in Perception
Analysis
20. Explain how social media influences perceptions. Use at least two specific examples to support and
justify your point.
Answer: will vary Type: E Influences on Perception Application
