Psychology of Social Perception and Communication Essay (Critical Writing)

Firstly, we have to begin by noting the source of loss of accuracy and the social bias. Humans are social beings, and thus they have to make judgments aimed at forming new relationships, forming mates and providing the judgment of others as well as forming alliances. All these indicate that humans need to gather skills geared towards solving personal problems and that of offering judgment to others. It is observed that a greater component of human psychology consists of loosely attached effects, some that are not intuitive and those that are curious. Camerer (2003) argues that these indicate the extent to which humans may end up making invalid judgments. People often make inferences that are misplaced that dispositions cause a greater impact on the individuals’ behaviour more than it does situation. Most people make incorrect thinking is that is associated with the biases of over-confidence, that of hindsight and what is termed as a sinister attribute. Also, studies indicate that human errors are committed in three various ways. First, we have the error that does not reveal the presence of an error when reevaluated. This is where the degree by which the error has been described seems misleading, or it could be incorrect in the essence. Another source of error could be the error produced can lead to other realistic decisions on balance and could be committed when a problem is evaluated in favour of others. The other error is that that when evaluated, it reveals that a fallacy was committed in reasoning, and it unearths wrong decision making [processes. Biases could arise from the type of problems as observed humans produce more relatively correct conclusions when parented with problems involving discrete probability more than those involving numeric probabilities. Another factor that may affect the reasoning and problem solving may be the content of the problem. Humans have different reactions to figures, words and even numbers. Problems that involve numbers may produce accurate results than those that involve words. Also considered is the paradigm of the problem. This is the mechanism employed in the analysis of the stated conclusions.

Wrong paradigms may mean fallacies; either the problem solutions look realistic or wrong, and vice versa.

Let’s now take a look at the basic factors that influence our social judgment. These factors are: impression formation and attribution, impression management, positive-negative asymmetry, self-other biases, just world beliefs and, social categorization and stereotyping, intergroup behaviour, third-person effect and strategic bias in language.

We start with impression management. This is the way people or individuals contain the impressions formed of them by other people. It is observed as an objective-oriented and conscious process, an attempt to affect other people’s thinking about a person. It controls the flow of information in a social setting. Also related to this is the concept of self-perception, where an individual focuses on reflections or image perception. Impression management is normally noted as IM. Dunbar (2003) asserts that for an individual to acquire positive perceptions of other people, he must first maintain congruent perceptions which he wants to present to the public. When viewed from the public and communications focus, it focuses on the way an individual is able to develop and maintain from personal to an organizational level which in turn create a good public image. This is as saying that individuals should be presenting themselves in the same way they require others to perceive them. This can be termed as the first impression (Ohmura, 2005). This idea is that the origination or other individual’s perception about you become the reality on which they create ideas and even the preempted behaviours. The great Greek philosopher Plato spoke of impression management as a great stage of human life while Shakespeare spoke of it as: The entire world is a stage, and the men and women in it are merely players. The individual is viewed as an actor who is shaped by the people who perceive him and even the environment where these are viewed as the targeted audience. In IM, the individual is expected to offer consistent audience impressions that are in coherence with the presumed goals. It is also noted that people differ as far as response to the environment, and even the targeted audience is concerned in that some may even become irresponsive, and others have considerably measurable responses. This process of ensuring an individual is in touch with the audience is called self-monitoring, and that of confirming that the individual is conforming to the audience’s perceptions is called self f validation (Cheney, 1986).

Secondly, we analyze the concept of self-other bias. This is where people have a great urge to believe the world is just an organized, just and predictable place where humans attain all their desires. This creates a major effect on our daily operations since we must assume that the actions we take will produce predictable results or consequences. This may lead us into trying to find justice should we suspect that the actions we have undertaken may not yield the desired outputs, or we may just try to convince ourselves that there wasn’t any justice that occurred. This may lead us to make conclusive results that those who happen to benefit deserve the benefit, and those that suffer deserve the sufferings. Also, this may lead us to say that when an innocent person suffers and there seem to be no possibility of rewarding him, then the practice encouraged people to degrade the sufferer in order to cause a more fitting between his fate and his character traits. The just world feeling makes individuals have a comfortable feeling with the world and its complications, and this may downplay the pursuit of justice and the moves to create a change in the society since the persons are contented with the status quo of the societal occurrences.

Schaller (1999) tells us that the third-person effect is where the person feels that the mass media information he is exposed to has adverse impacts on others and not himself. This is called the hypothesis of perception, where the individual perceives that the other vulnerability stems from the backing given o mass media restrictions. In this case, people get compelled by themselves so as to perceive actions only after exposure to persuasion messages and the action is always taken because of anticipated reactions of other individuals (Levy,2004). The action commonly taken is normally probabilistic and may be coherent to the message or meant to give it a counter. The considered effects are those of the influence of the media and the size of the effect (Bering,2004).

Also, the messages that have unpredictable effects may cause reverse effects, or they may reduce the effects or repercussions. This idea is that of a person having the belief that they are capable of doing something other than the others-a feeling of superiority. A third person effect is a form of hypothesis of behaviour which is very significant in the censorship issues where an individual will rarely confess they have ever been seriously impacted due to the prohibited information although they have had cases of the sort instead lay emphasis on the protection of the public.

Impression formation is the fast development of the common perceptions or even the type of understanding a person gives to a specific individual based on a number of features. This may involve the models of combining data about a person. It could be those that require addiction models and those that do not involve addiction. Impression formation may adversely affect the way people offer their judgments about you. For instance, impressions created on such grounds as tribal.racial and gender grounds may offer invalid conclusions about a person character since individuals are not judged o their behaviour but on some unpredictable grounds. Individuals have been mistakenly arrested and even jailed simply because impressions created about them were used to offer incorrect information or used to match them with the wrong persons. The attribution entails the modification of behaviour by embracing the concept of learners getting encouraged by the fact that they should be able to have a pleasant feeling of themselves. Barrett (2005) says that it involves cognition in that it tries to explain that the perceptions of the learners about the current state of affairs may adversely affect their future perceptions and even their successes or failure. It puts that the chances o failure or success may be from internal or external factors where new may be successful or fail due to the factors we lay our beliefs on. This may be due to the fact that the factors exist in our environment, or they may be originating from ourselves. Another factor attributed to our success or failure may be stability. If our belief is that the outcome will be stable, then it, in turn, comes out to be stable; otherwise, they will be unstable. Successor failure may also be affected by the degree of control. A factor that is controllable if we believe in it may cause us to have an alteration to our outcomes, but the uncontrollable ones will lead to lees alterations of the outcomes. The major aspect of attribution is that individuals will always give an interpretation of their environment so as to keep a completely positive image of themselves. For instance, in the case of learners who succeed in the academic arena, the success is attributed to their own capabilities or the amount of energy they input in their academics but end up attributing the failure to autonomous factors that they bear no control over. In general, the attribution theory indicates that an individual’s motivation is linked to his own perceptions about himself or his to the quantity of effort the individual put into his activities in the future. Therefore it calls for four factors that influence an individual’s success or failure as ability, luck, task complexity and effort.

The other factor is positive-negative asymmetry. This is the impulse that is created in person perceptions about a specific personality. It causes different reactions as far as the impressions of the individuals, or the organization is concerned. First, we note that social attributes stated negatively are in the receipt of extreme responses than those that are positively stated and that personal concepts are attributed to factors as intimidation, items of deception that are all linked to impression management that, in turn, act as determinants of psychology. For instance, the negative perception will have a diverse effect so a business organization. The impression of customers about the management may affect the productivity of the transaction in that more customers may tend not to receive services from the organization. Positive –negative asymmetry also may originate from the environment where individuals [perceptions about others is majorly dictated by the same feelings he has for his environment.

An imbalance in both the factors indicates that the perceptions are flawed and may not depict the correct behaviour of individuals.

Also evident is the strategic bias in language. It could be common in a learning environment where learners are taught using words of varying phonology. The target words get specific primes. The words are altered with changing meanings and categories. In the case of learners who haven’t captured the pattern of alteration of the meanings of the words, they may end up being discriminated against linguistically. This is said o be strategic language bias since it is deliberate in cutting out others from communication. The learner’s expectancy of particular meaning is downplayed with inconsistent results.

Because of this, the approach is discriminative and may influence the extent to which an individual perceives others.

Social organization and stereotyping is also an issue as far as our social justice is concerned. This covers such aspects as a selection of the category by individuals, the application of the category and even the motivation factors. These factors have their social Implications associated with them. It may also seem that such issues as homogeneity and assimilation are attributed to socials groups. Individuals fit into their distinct groups by selection. When individuals get identified as groups and not as individuals or as members of a given category, then we are left with maybe social consequences. First, a person may have his characters generalized with those of the groups; this is in the event that they do not match. Secondly, cases of mistaken identities may arise since people tend to associate a person’s character with someone’s and lastly is the idea of misconception and incorrectly formed conclusions that the whole of the category is homogenous. Social categorization and stereotyping are natural processes in which those who perceive them mainly depend on day-to-day social events.

They are greatly associated with each other. Those who perceive them always expect that the stated categories should differ adversely in the various concepts or fields. This shows that category selection is greatly determined by the person’s stereotypes. Also, the overall application mainly affects the principles on which the goals or objectives are revolving. Thus the individual’s differences and indifferences are incorporated in the stereotype beliefs, which consequently tend to be productive determinants of the content of the stereotype.

Stereotyping may also bring out the issue of imbalanced goals since individuals just fall into social groups dictated by the degree of the formed stereotypes and not the underlying goals.

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