The Communication Playbook. Teri Kwal Gamble
the tendency to close oneself to new experiences), selective attention (the tendency to focus on certain cues or stimuli and ignore others), and selective retention (the tendency to remember those things that reinforce one’s way of thinking and forget those that do not).
Effects of Selectivity
Selective perception enables us to create a more limited and also a more coherent and personally meaningful picture of the world, one that conforms to the beliefs, expectations, and convictions we hold. For example, in a famous experiment, subjects were shown a short video of two teams, one wearing white shirts and the other in black shirts, moving around and passing basketballs to one another. The subjects were asked to count the number of passes made by members of the white team. Halfway through the video, a person wearing a full-body gorilla-suit walks slowly to the middle of the screen, pounds its chest, and walks out of the frame. While consumed with counting passes, about 50% of the subjects missed the gorilla. Their mental spotlight had been directed elsewhere. They were not looking for a gorilla, so they didn’t see one.4
© 1999, Daniel J. Simons. Video screenshot taken at http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html
Perceptual processes are not only highly selective, they also are personally based. As a result, different people experience the same cues in very different ways. In essence, we never really come into direct contact with reality.5 Instead, everything we experience is mediated by the nervous system.
Age and Memory Influence Perception
Age can influence perception. The aging brain consumes and processes more data, sifting through larger amounts of information than the brains of traditional college-aged students. Students this age are more able to ignore distractions, whereas older people, because of their reduced ability to filter, exhibit more inclusive attention. As a result, older people tend not to make snap judgments regarding what is or could become important. This frees them to learn more about situations and people—giving them a potential perceptual advantage.6
Memory and perception are also linked. Earlier perceptions influence future ones.7 How we interpret and respond to selected stimuli determines if a particular person or experience enters our memory. If a perception does enter our memory, we are able to retrieve and use it again and again.
A reliable memory, however, depends on whether our reconstruction of experience is accurate and clear.8 Our perceptual abilities, distorted by our beliefs, desires, and interests, affect how we interpret and remember events.9 For example, although it occurred in 2001, many of us still have vivid memories of 9/11. In interviews, when asked to recall those memories, people spoke of having watched television all morning, riveted by images of the two planes striking the twin towers. This memory was, in fact, false. There was no video of the first plane hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Despite this reality, 73% of Americans surveyed said they saw this happen. What’s more, they felt confident about their memories.
Memories of events that did not actually happen the way we remember them are the cause of countless disputes. Memory is a human construct, an amalgam of what we experience, read, piece together, and want to be true. A number of reasons account for our misremembering events: Memories are transient and tend to fade over time; we remember aspects of an event but are likely to misattribute them; and our biases distort our recollections.
When has memory influenced your perception of an event? Our memories, like perception, are fallible, something we need to remember.10
We Organize Our Perceptions
How do we make sense of our world? How do we process the stimuli that compete for our attention? Just as we use an array of strategies to select those impressions we notice, so we employ a number of strategies to facilitate meaningful organization of these impressions.
The Figure–Ground Principle
During the perception process, we are active participants. We do not simply sit back and absorb the stimuli available to us the way a sponge absorbs liquid. We select, organize, and evaluate the multitude of stimuli that bombard us, so that what we are focusing on becomes figure and the rest of what we experience becomes ground.11 This is how the figure–ground principle functions.
To experience the concept of figure and ground, examine Figure 3.2. What do you see? At first glance, you likely see a vase—or you may see two people facing each other. When stimuli compete for our attention, we can focus only on one, because it is simply impossible to perceive something in two ways at once. Although we may be able to switch our focus rapidly, we still will perceive only one stimulus at any given time.
Figure 3.2 Face Vase Illusion
Perceptual Constancy
Perceptual constancy is the tendency we have to maintain the same perception of something or someone over time. As a consequence of perceptual constancy, we see people not as they are, but as we have been conditioned to see them. This helps explain why it is hard for us to alter a perception once we form it.
Perceptual Schemata
We also use perceptual schemata to organize our perceptions. For example, we’ll categorize people using physical constructs, which describe people’s appearance to classify them, such as whether one is overweight or slender, beautiful or ugly; role constructs, which describe social position, including wife, daughter, teacher; interaction constructs, which are descriptive of people’s social behavior, like caring, ingratiating, or approachable; and psychological constructs, which emphasize people’s state of mind, such as whether one is secure, sad, or self-obsessed.12
Closure
The tendency to fill in missing perceptual pieces is called closure. Look at the stimuli pictured in Figure 3.3. What do you see? Most see a dog rather than a collection of inkblots, and a rectangle, triangle, and circle rather than some lines and an arc. Because we seek to fill in gaps, we mentally complete the incomplete figures. We fill them in on the basis of our previous experiences and our needs. We make sense of ourselves, people, and events in much the same way. We fill in what is not there by making assumptions or inferences, some of which are more accurate and valid than others. We should remember this when we explore how we perceive the self.
Figure 3.3
Perceiving the “I” Affects Perception of You
How we perceive and communicate with ourselves, and how others perceive and communicate with us, builds in us a sense of self. Our sense of self evolves as we interact with different people, experience new situations, and form new relationships.
Looking at the Self
It is important to spend time considering who you think you are.
If someone asked you to answer the question “Who are you?” 10 separate times—and if each time you had to supply a fresh response—what responses would you offer? Would you be able to group your answers into categories? For example, do you see yourself in reference to your gender (male, female, trans), your religion (Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, Christian), your race (African, Hispanic, Caucasian, Asian), your nationality (U.S. citizen, Turkish, German), your physical attributes