Perception Process in Psychology

Study Notes

The perception process involves actively creating meaning by selecting, organizing, and interpreting people, objects, events, and other phenomena.
This process often occurs simultaneously.
The three steps of the perception process are:
- Selection: choosing what to focus on.
- Organization: structuring the information we've selected.
- Interpretation: assigning meaning to what we've organized.

We pay attention to things that stand out.
We also notice things we haven't before due to gaining new knowledge, skills, or experiences.
Our selection is influenced by factors such as:
- Who we are, our needs, motivations, and location.
- Our cultural background.

We organize and interpret experiences using schemata, which are mental frameworks that help us understand the world.
Types of schemata include:
- Prototypes: ideal examples of a category.
- Personal Constructs: categories or bipolar dimensions that we use to define people and things.
  - Example: Attractive-unattractive, intelligent-unintelligent.
  - Limitation of personal constructs: We only notice qualities that fit within our existing constructs.
- Stereotypes: generalizations about people and situations that allow us to anticipate behaviors.
  - Important note: It's better to have flexible rather than rigid stereotypes.
- Scripts: sequences of behaviors we anticipate for ourselves and others in specific situations.

Attributions: Explanations we give for behaviors.
When attributing behavior, we consider:
- Locus: Is the behavior internally motivated or externally motivated?
- Stability: Is the behavior stable or temporary?
- Specificity: Is the behavior global or specific to a situation?
- Responsibility: Is the behavior within the person's control or beyond their control?

Self-Serving Bias:
- We tend to attribute our positive behaviors to internal factors (stable, global, within our control).
- We tend to attribute our negative behaviors to external factors (unstable, specific, beyond our control).
Fundamental Attribution Error: focuses on negative behaviors and locus.
- For our own negative behavior: We underestimate internal causes and overestimate external causes.
- For others' negative behavior: We overestimate internal causes and underestimate external causes.

Physiology: How our bodies affect our perception.
Expectations: What we anticipate influences what we perceive.
Age: Our age can shape our perceptions.
Culture, Social Location, Roles: Cultural background, social position, and roles can impact what we attend to, how we organize information, and how we interpret it.
Cognitive Ability: Our cognitive complexity or how sophisticated our thinking process is influences our perceptions.
Self: Our unique characteristics and experiences influence our perceptions.
- Implicit Personality Theory: Assumptions we make about how traits are related in people's personalities (For example, assuming that outgoing people are also confident or that quiet people are insecure).

Selection, organization, and interpretation are interactive: What we choose to perceive influences how we organize and interpret stimuli.
The Labels We Use Matter: Language affects perception, and our perceptions influence the language we use to describe things.