The Communication Playbook. Teri Kwal Gamble
Assess your ability to distinguish facts and inferences by reading the following story, assuming the information it contains is true and accurate, and then answering questions based on it by indicating whether you think the statement made is definitely true (T), definitely false (F), or questionable (?) meaning that it could be either true or false, but on the basis of the information contained in the story, you cannot be certain). The correct answers appear at the end of the text in the Answer Key.
A tired executive had just turned off the lights in the establishment when an individual approached and demanded money. The owner opened the safe. The contents of the safe were emptied, and the person ran away. The alarm was triggered, notifying the police of the occurrence.
1 An individual appeared after the owner had turned off the store’s lights. T F ?
2 The robber was a man. T F ?
3 The person who appeared did not demand any money. T F ?
4 The man who opened the drawer was the owner. T F ?
5 The owner emptied the safe and ran away. T F ?
6 Someone opened the safe. T F ?
7 After the individual who demanded the money emptied the safe, he sped away. T F ?
8 Although the safe contained money, the story does not reveal how much. T F ?
9 The robber opened the safe. T F ?
10 The robber did not take the money. T F ?
11 In this story, only three people are referred to. T F ?
Gender, Self-Concept, and Perception
Do you think you might feel differently and look at things differently were you to identify with a gender other than the one you currently identify with? If your answer is yes, is it because you believe a change in your gender-identification would cause you to perceive things differently, or because you imagine that others would treat you differently?
Standpoints: Lessons Frame Perceptions
Men, women, and gender-nonconforming people adopt different standpoints, perceive different realities, have different expectations set for them, and exhibit different communication preferences. Through interaction with parents, teachers, peers, and others, we internalize the lessons of appropriate male and female behavior. These lessons frame our perceptions and teach us how society expects us to behave. These constructs, however, can limit the way gender is perceived and may contribute to our being judged on the basis of gender expectations rather than observed cues or how we define our gender.
Beliefs Can Blind Us
Beliefs regarding gender-appropriate behavior not only influence how we see ourselves but also how we relate to others. Some people treat others differently simply because of their gender. In fact, many people persist in dressing boy and girl babies in different colors and styles. Our experiences during our formative years influence our later views of gender, affecting our identity and self-perceptions. For this reason, when asked to describe their characteristics, men mention qualities such as initiative, control, and ambition. Women, in contrast, lead with qualities such as creativity, concern for others, and consideration. Generally, men in the United States derive their self-esteem from their achievements, status, and income, while women derive their self-esteem based on appearance and relationships.53
Unfortunately, many women develop less positive self-concepts than do men. Our society expects those who identify as female to be nurturing, unaggressive, deferential, and emotionally expressive. Because of this expectation, women with female identities are rewarded for having pleasing appearances, revealing their feelings, and being forgiving and helpful to others. Starting at a young age, girls are more likely to be self-critical and self-doubting than boys. Although women of all ages tend to value relationships, adolescent girls in particular can become so preoccupied with pleasing others that they metaphorically “bend themselves into pretzels.”54 Do you find this true?
Men are more apt to develop an independent sense of self. Because men are expected to be strong, resilient, ambitious, in control of their emotions, and successful, they experience positive reinforcement for displaying these characteristics. Independence is central to their lives and often leads to those with masculine identities feeling better about themselves than do those with feminine identities.55
Although appearance traditionally has played little role in the self-image of men, in recent years this has changed. More emphasis is now placed on the looks and builds of men, with extreme muscularity or thinness often the goal. For the most part, media present and reinforce prevalent conceptions of masculinity and femininity although they also can pave the way for societal acceptance of alternative conceptions.
All too frequently, rigid categorization creates communication problems. For example, beginning with the war in Iraq, we witnessed an evolution in the Pentagon’s and public’s perceptions of the positions in which women and men could serve in the military. Women and men, including trans women and men, have served in combat roles, come under attack, and been injured and killed. Whereas many are able to reconcile the traditional feminine role with that of a soldier in combat, others find it difficult to juxtapose contrasting perceptions. In fact, in 2017, the president of the United States ordered the military to reevaluate the presence of transgender soldiers in the military. Is this based on fact or prejudice? Where do you stand?
Culture, Self-Concept, and Perception
Culture is a powerful teacher. Whether we are judging beauty or evaluating a child’s behavior, the cultural lens we look through influences our assessments of reality. Many years back, researchers seeking to demonstrate this used a binocular-like device to compare the perceptual preferences of Americans and Mexicans. They showed each subject 10 pairs of photographs. In each pair, one photo displayed a picture from U.S. culture and the other photo a picture from Mexican culture. After viewing the paired images through the binoculars, the subjects reported their observations. Both the Americans and the Mexicans were more likely to report having seen a picture from their own culture—the other image visible through the viewfinder was not perceived.56 Similarly, we tend to be more perceptually accurate in recognizing and interpreting expressions of emotion sent by members of our own culture.57
Barriers to Understanding
In an effort to blunt “the culture effect,” educators in some conflict-ridden societies use textbooks that encourage students to synthesize conflicting versions of events rather than choose one side. For example, the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East published a booklet that divided pages into three columns, one for the Israeli version of history, one for the Palestinian version, and one left blank for the student to fill in.58
Misunderstandings may result, however, when the cultures of interacting parties cause them to operate according to different assumptions and rules. For example, North Americans perceive talk as desirable. They value directness and are apt to perceive someone who fails to “tell it like it is” either as vague or cowardly. In contrast, members of Asian cultures place more value on silence, believing that one who understands need not speak. From the Asian standpoint, a person who states the obvious is a show-off. When we fail to realize that we have not all absorbed the same cultural lessons, cultural nearsightedness—the failure to understand that not all of us attribute the same meanings to behavioral cues—can cause us to misread signs and miss opportunities to use the differences between us to perceive one another more clearly.
Notions of the Self are Culturally Based
Like perception, identity does not develop identically in every society. At least in part, who we are, or our whole notion of self, emerges from participation in a culture. In North American and Western European cultures, the self is considered paramount. Members of these cultures tend to reflect the importance placed on individuals as they first set