Читать книгу The Interpersonal Communication Playbook - Teri Kwal Gamble - Страница 119

Just as we use a number of strategies to select what impressions we notice, we do the same to facilitate our meaningful organization of these impressions. One strategy is to categorize a stimulus according to the figure-ground principle. What we choose to focus on becomes the figure, and the rest of what we experience is the ground. We are able to alternate the figure and ground of what we perceive. In a classroom, for example, if you focus on what a fellow student is doing during your professor’s lecture, the student becomes the figure, while the professor recedes into the background. When you focus your attention on the professor, she is the figure, and the rest of the classroom is the ground.

A second organizing strategy is closure. Every time we fill in a missing perceptual piece, we employ closure. Look at the stimuli pictured in Figure 3.2. What do you see? Most see a dog and a circle. Because we seek to close gaps, we mentally fill in the incomplete figures. We want to perceive a completed world, as it were, so we supply elements that are not really part of the stimuli or messages we process. For example, the assumptions we make about others’ motivations help us make sense of our own relationships. We might conclude that a friend invited us to a party only because she needed our help in passing a course. Whether the sense we make is right or wrong, justified or unjustified, it fills in certain gaps. Just as what you choose to notice is up to you, you can choose how to organize what you perceive.

Figure 3.2 Illustrations of the Closure Principle

A third organizational strategy is perceptual constancy—the tendency we have to maintain the same perception of stimuli over time. As a consequence of perceptual constancy, we often see people not as they are, but as we have been conditioned to see them. The constancy principle helps explain why we find it difficult to alter a perception once we form it. A large number of our perceptions are learned and then reinforced over time.

Perceptual constancy is facilitated by our use of schemata, which are the mental templates or patterns of thought we carry with us. A script is a type of schemata, through which we enact the general ideas we have about people and situations and how things should play out during routine activities. We develop schemata and scripts based on both real and vicarious experiences. By reverting to schemata, we are able to classify people into manageable categories, according to their appearance, psychological traits, group memberships, and so on. Sometimes schemata, as we will discover later in this chapter, also contribute to stereotyping, which can lead us to see what is not there while ignoring what is.