Читать книгу The Communication Playbook - Teri Kwal Gamble - Страница 145

Past experiences can create expectations that produce in us a readiness to process experience in predetermined ways. If, for example, we had a bad experience working on a group project with another student, we likely would become upset if asked to work on a subsequent project with that same student. These perceptual sets affect our interpretation of ourselves, others, and experience.

To better understand how a perceptual set affects us, quickly read the statements written in the triangles in Figure 3.7. Then examine the individual words more carefully. During your first reading, did you miss anything that you now perceive? Many of us fail to see the second the or a in the statements in their first reading. Did you? Why? We are so accustomed to seeing words in familiar groups, or clusters, that often we simply fail to perceive extra words when we see them in such phrases.

Figure 3.7

Motivations such as hunger and poverty also can alter interpretations of experience. In one study, researchers showed sailors some ambiguous pictures and asked them to describe what they saw. Hungry sailors “saw with the stomach”—to them, an elongated smudge looked like a fork, and a swirl looked like a fried onion. In a second study, rich and poor children were shown circles of various sizes and asked which ones were the same sizes as some coins. The poor children consistently chose circles that were much too large. Why? A quarter looks bigger to the poor than to the rich.⁴⁴

Perceptual sets are the product of our unique life experiences. The lessons life has taught you necessarily differ from those life has taught others. As a result, we may perceive the same stimulus differently.