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Chapter 2
Self and Perception
CHAPTER OUTCOMES
• Identify the components of self and understand how self impacts communication
• Learn how to present the self to others, both online and offline
• Explore how the perception process works and the common errors made within this process
• Explain the ways people form impressions of others
• Describe the importance of perception-checking and empathy for improving communication
skills
CHAPTER OUTLINE
THE NATURE OF SELF
Your “self” isn’t just one thing, it’s many things: who you think you are as a person; your
values, attitudes, and beliefs; and how you feel about your self-worth. Because all of these
factors influence how you communicate, the first step to improving your communication is to
understand your self.
• Your self shapes how you communicate, whether online or offline, with friends or in
groups, and even before an audience.
○ Self is an evolving blend of three components:
2. Self-concept
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3. Self-esteem
SELF-AWARENESS
• Self-awareness is the ability to view yourself as a unique person distinct from your
surrounding environment and to reflect on your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In short, it
means asking yourself, “Who am I?”
1. What am I thinking and feeling?
2. Why am I thinking and feeling this way?
3. How am I communicating?
4. How are my inner thoughts and feelings affecting my communication?
5. How can I improve my thoughts, feelings, and communication?
SELF-CONCEPT
• Self-concept is the overall assessment of who you are; it answers this question: “I’m a
_____ person.” It is based on the beliefs, attitudes, and values you have about yourself.
○ Beliefs are convictions that certain things are true (“I’m a caring person.”).
○ Attitudes are evaluations (“I’m satisfied with my fitness level.”).
○ Values are enduring principles that guide your behaviors (“I think it’s morally wrong to
lie.”).
• Self-verification theory suggests that you often choose your relational partners based on
how well they support your self-concept. This includes choosing others who support a
positive or a negative self-concept.
• Self-fulfilling prophecies are predictions that you make about future interactions that cause
you to communicate in ways that make your predictions come true.
SELF-ESTEEM
• Self-esteem is the overall value you assign to yourself. It answers this question: “Given who
I am, what’s my evaluation of my worth?”
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2. Your ought self is the person you think others want you to be. The concept of ought
self stems from expectations of your family, friends, colleagues, and romantic partners,
1. Assess your self-esteem. List the beliefs, attitudes, and values that make up your self-
2. Analyze your ideal self. Who do you wish you were? If this ideal self is attainable, how
could you become this person?
3. Analyze your ought self. Who do others want you to be? What would you have to do to
become this person?
4. Revisit and redefine your standards. If your ideal and ought selves are realistic and
5. Create an action plan. List the actions necessary to reach your ideal and ought selves.
Establish a realistic time line, perhaps several months or years. Then carry out this
action plan, checking your progress as you go.
CULTURE, GENDER, AND SELF
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immediate family.
○ Individual achievement is praised as the highest good.
○ Countries with individualistic cultures include the United States, New Zealand, and
Sweden.
• Collectivistic cultures promote the value of belonging to groups that look after you in
exchange for your loyalty.
○ In collectivistic cultures, the goals, needs, and views of the group matter more than those
of individuals.
• Gender is the set of social, psychological, and cultural attributes that characterize a person
as male or female.
○ Your concept of gender forms over time through interactions with others.
appropriate behavior for each gender.
○ Gender is distinct from the biological sex organs you are born with that distinguish you
anatomically as male or female. For example, a transgender person possesses a strong
sense of gendered self-identity (male/female) that doesn’t correspond to the biological
sex they were born with.
PRESENTING YOUR SELF
Every time you communicate with others, you present a version of your self to them. Sometimes
this represents who you really are. Other times you may hide your true self. In either case, the
self you present is the “you” people know. If you want people to see you in a certain way, it’s
essential to learn how to present your self skillfully.
○ Private self is the combination of your self-awareness, self-concept, and self-esteem.
○ People know and judge the “you” who communicates with them—not the “you” that you
keep inside.
○ Managing your public self is a crucial part of being a competent communicator.
CREATING FACES AND MASKS
• Face is the positive self you want others to see and believe; you actively create it through
your communication. It can be anything (perky, upbeat, cool) and varies depending on the
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LOSING FACE
• Losing face occurs when you create a certain face (or a mask) and then do something that
MAINTAINING FACE
• Maintaining face often involves the following:
○ Using words and actions that are consistent with the face you’re trying to create
○ Making sure your communication meshes with others’ existing knowledge about you
○ Trying to anticipate and manage events that could contradict your face
• When you lose face try to
○ Promptly acknowledge that the event happened. People who consistently deny their
inconsistencies or who blame others for their lapses are judged much more harshly;
○ Admit responsibility for any of your actions that contributed to the event;
PERCEIVING OTHERS
Along with your view of self, your perception of others determines how you communicate.
Although it may seem that your view of other people is both accurate and objective, it is
anything but. Understanding the process of perception will help you avoid errors that might
cause you to communicate incompetently.
• Perception is the process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting information from your
senses; it’s the gateway to the world around you, and what you “see” through this gateway
determines the communication path you’ll pursue as you walk through it.
THE PERCEPTION PROCESS
The perception process occurs when you
• Select information to focus your attention on.
○ Selecting information involves focusing your attention on certain sights, sounds, tastes,
touches, and smells in your environment.
○ One estimate suggests that even though our senses take in 11 million bits of information
• Organize the information from your senses into an understandable or coherent pattern in
your mind, such as words, phrases, ideas, or images.
• Interpret the meaning of the pattern by calling to mind familiar information that’s relevant
and using that information to make sense of what you’re hearing and seeing.
ATTRIBUTIONS AND PERCEPTUAL ERRORS
• Attribution is the process of assigning an explanation for why things happen the way they
do. Two types of attributions are commonplace:
1. External factors or events are the things outside of the person that cause the person’s
behavior.
2. Internal factors are the personality, character, and emotions that cause the person to act
as he or she does.
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2. Actor-observer effect is the tendency to make external attributions regarding your own
behaviors, particularly during unpleasant interactions.
• Self-serving bias is the tendency to attribute mistakes to external controls and successes to
internal controls.
FORMING IMPRESSIONS
Whenever you meet people, you paint pictures in your mind of who they are and what you think
of them. These images can be positive or negative, long lasting or subject to change. However,
these pictures act as a powerful guide in shaping your communication, for better or for worse.
• Impressions of others are created when you use the perception process to form mental
images of who people are and how you feel about them.
○ All aspects of the perception process shape your impressions: the information you select
to focus your attention on, the way you organize this information, the interpretations you
GESTALTS
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• Gestalt is the process of forming a general impression of a person that’s positive or
negative.
○ Gestalts form rapidly from a few traits you identify about the person.
○ They are useful for encounters in which you must make quick judgments about others
with limited information.
ALGEBRAIC IMPRESSIONS
• An algebraic impression is an analysis of the positive and negative things you learn about
someone to calculate an overall impression, updating your impression as you learn new
information.
○ Information that’s important, unusual, or negative is usually weighted more heavily than
information that’s trivial, typical, or positive because people tend to believe this type of
information reveals more about a person’s “true” character than more positive or
STEREOTYPES
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blanket assumptions about their character and worth based solely on their social group
affiliations before it’s possible to make any other impression.
○ Stereotyping is difficult to avoid and is the most common way we form impressions.
○ Stereotyping often leads to flawed impressions.
○ The Internet enables stereotyping because the lack of nonverbal communication cues and
IMPROVING YOUR PERCEPTION
Even though perception and impression formation occur in specific ways, they are not
unchangeable processes. You can improve your perception and impressions by critically
questioning your own judgments and routinely considering the feelings, needs, and viewpoints
of others.
• Skills that can help you improve your perception are perception-checking and empathy.
PERCEPTION-CHECKING
• Perception-checking is a five-step process for testing your impression of someone else and
avoiding errors in judgment:
1. Review your knowledge about the other person. Your impression of this individual is
2. Assess attributions you’ve made about this individual. Avoid attributing the person’s
behavior exclusively to internal causes.
4. Share your impression with the individual. Present it as “here’s my viewpoint,” not as the
“right” or “only” perspective.
5. Check your impression with the other person.
• Mastering perception-checking takes practice, but the effort is worthwhile.
○ Perception-checking helps you make fewer communication blunders.
EMPATHY
• Empathy, from the Greek word empatheia, is when you “feel into” others’ thoughts and
emotions, making an attempt to identify with them. It has two components: perspective–
taking and empathic concern.
2. Empathic concern means becoming aware of how other people are feeling and