Improving Your Perceptions

Our self-perceptions of ourselves are dynamic and subject to change. Context-specific self-perceptions are influenced by factors such as the individuals we engage with, our emotional state, and the topic under discussion. Developing an awareness of the intricacies of self-perception, along with understanding the components that contribute to our self-concept, empowers you to enhance and navigate your self-perceptions more effectively.

We can recognize recurring patterns that often hinder the capacity to observe, comprehend, and modify self-perceptions. Transforming one’s overarching self-concept or self-esteem is a challenging endeavor, as these reflections of our identity and self-judgments evolve through numerous interactions over time. Significant life events have the potential to swiftly reshape our self-perceptions. Consider the shift in self-view that occurs when transitioning from high school to college. Likewise, individuals undergoing life-changing experiences such as entering a committed relationship, becoming parents, relocating geographically, or starting a new job will likely undergo shifts in their self-perceptions.

Aside from experiencing life-changing events, we can make slow changes to our self-perceptions with concerted effort aimed at becoming more competent communicators through self-monitoring and reflection. As you actively try to change your self-perceptions, do not be surprised if you encounter some resistance from a significant other. When you change or improve your self-concept, your communication will also change, which may prompt other people to respond to you differently. Although you may have good reasons for changing certain aspects of your self-perception, others may become unsettled or confused by your changing behaviors and communication. Remember, people try to increase predictability and decrease uncertainty within human social experiences.

For example, many students begin to take their college education more seriously during their junior and senior years. As these students begin to change their self-concept to include the role of “serious student preparing to graduate and enter the professional world,” they may have friends who want to maintain the “semiserious student who doesn’t exert much effort and prefers partying to studying” role that used to be a shared characteristic of both students’ self-concepts. As the first student’s behavior changes to accommodate this new aspect of his or her self-concept, it may upset the friend who was used to weeknights spent hanging out rather than studying.

Avoid Reliance on Rigid Schema

Schemata are sets of information based on cognitive and experiential knowledge that guide our interaction. We rely on schemata almost constantly to help us make sense of the world around us. Sometimes schemata become so familiar that we use them as scripts, which prompts mindless communication and can lead us to overlook new information that may need to be incorporated into the schema. Therefore it’s important to remain mindful of new or contradictory information that may warrant revision of a schema.

Being mindful is difficult, especially since we often unconsciously rely on schemata. Think about when you’re driving to a familiar location, how you sometimes arrive at your destination without clearly remembering the actual drive. Despite all the advanced psychomotor skills needed to drive, such as braking, turning, and adjusting to other drivers, we can pull into a familiar driveway or parking lot having driven the whole way on autopilot. This is not necessarily a bad thing. However, have you ever slipped into autopilot on a familiar route only to remember that you are actually going somewhere else after you’ve already missed your turn? This example illustrates the importance of keeping our schemata flexible and avoiding mindless communication.

Be Critical of Socializing Forces

Family, friends, sociocultural norms, and the media are just some of the socializing forces that influence our thinking and therefore influence our self-perception. These powerful forces serve as positive functions but can also set into motion negative patterns of self-perception.

Two examples can illustrate the possibility for people to critique and resist socializing forces in order to improve their self-perception. The first deals with physical appearance and notions of health, and the second deals with cultural identity and discrimination.

First Example: The media presents us with narrow and often unrealistic standards for attractiveness. Even though most of us know that these standards don’t represent what the typical ideal, we still internalize these concepts. This can result in various problems ranging from eating disorders, depression, to poor self-esteem.

Second Example: Cultural influences related to identity can also lead to distorted self-perceptions, especially for people who occupy marginalized or oppressed identities. While perception research has often been used to support the notion that individuals who are subjected to discrimination, like racial and ethnic minorities, are likely to have low self-esteem because they internalize negative societal views, this is not always the case (Armenta & Hunt, 2009). In fact, some research has indicated that minorities do not passively accept the negative views society places on them. Instead, they actively try to maintain favorable self-perceptions regardless of discriminatory attitudes. Numerous studies have shown that people in groups that are the target of discrimination may identify with their group more because of this threat. This  may help them maintain a sense of psychological well-being.

Create and Maintain Supporting Interpersonal Relationships

Aside from giving yourself affirming messages to help with self-perception, it is important to find positive social support. Although most people have some supportive relationships, many also have people in their lives who range from negative to toxic. When you find yourself in a negative relationship, whether it is with friends, family, or romantic partners, it is difficult to end those connections. However, it is wise to surround yourself with people who validate you and constructively challenge you, so you maintain an undistorted self-perception.

Beware of self-fulfilling prophecies

Self-fulfilling prophecies are thoughts and actions in which a person’s false belief triggers a behavior that makes the initial false belief actually or seemingly come true (Guyll, Madon, Prieto & Scherr, 2010). For example, let’s say a student’s anatomy professor is a foreign and speaks English as a second language. The student falsely believes that the instructor will not be a good teacher because he speaks English with an accent. Because of this belief, the student doesn’t attend class regularly and doesn’t listen actively when he does attend. Because of those behaviors, the student fails the anatomy class, which reinforces his original belief that the professor wasn’t a good teacher.

Although the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies was originally developed to be applied to social inequality and discrimination, it has since been applied in many other contexts, including interpersonal communication. This research has found that some people are chronically insecure, meaning they are very concerned about being accepted by others but constantly feel that other people will dislike them. This can manifest in relational insecurity, which is again based on feelings of inferiority resulting from social comparison with others perceived to be more secure and superior. Such people often end up reinforcing their belief that others will dislike them because of the behaviors triggered by their irrational belief.

Take the following scenario as an example: An insecure person assumes that his date will not like him. During the date he doesn’t engage in much conversation, discloses negative information about himself, and exhibits anxious behaviors. Because of these behaviors, his date forms a negative impression and suggests they not see each other again, reinforcing his original belief that the date wouldn’t like him. The example shows how a pattern of thinking can lead to a pattern of behavior that reinforces the thinking, and so on. Luckily, experimental research shows that self-affirmation techniques can be successfully used to intervene in such self-fulfilling prophecies. Thinking positive thoughts and focusing on personality strengths can stop this negative cycle of thinking and has been shown to have positive effects on academic performance, weight loss, and interpersonal relationships (Stinson, Shepherd, Logel & Zanna, 2011).

Beware of Distorted Patterns of Thinking and Acting

You already know from our discussion of attribution errors that we all have perceptual biases that distort our thinking. Many of these are common, and automatic. Learning about some of the typical negative patterns of thinking,  may help us acknowledge and avoid those pitfalls. One such pattern involves self-esteem and overcompensation.

People can engage in a negative thought and action cycle by setting unrealistic goals. Similar to a self-fulfilling prophecy, people who set unrealistic goals can end up with negative feelings of self-efficacy, which as we learned earlier, can negatively affect self-esteem and self-concept. The goals we set should be challenging but realistic.

Some people develop low self-esteem because they lack accurate information about themselves. A person can intentionally try to maintain high self-esteem by ignoring or downplaying negative comments and beliefs by only focusing on positive evaluations. While this can be a positive, it can also lead to a distorted self-concept. There is a middle ground between dwelling on the negative and ignoring potentially constructive feedback about weaknesses and missing opportunities. Conversely, people who have low self-esteem or negative self-concepts may ignore positive feedback.

Overcoming Barriers to Perceiving Others

There are many barriers that prevent us from competently perceiving others. While some are more difficult to overcome than others, they can all be addressed by raising our awareness of the influences around us.  Commitment to monitoring and changing our communication habits will increase our ability to improve our  listening skills and empathy, while avoiding stereotyping and unconscious prejudices.

Develop Active Listening Skills

Effective listening is not easy, and most of us do not make a concerted effort to overcome common barriers to listening. Our fast-paced lives and cultural values that emphasize speaking over listening sometimes make listening feel like a chore. However, we shouldn’t underestimate the power of listening to make someone else feel better and to open our perception to new information. Active listening can also help us expand our self- and social awareness by learning from other people’s experiences and viewing a different perspective.

Everyone’s reality is uniquely their own. When you concede that someone’s reality isn’t like yours and you are OK with that, then you have overcome a significant barrier to becoming more aware of the perception process.

Beware of Stereotypes and Prejudice

Stereotypes are sets of beliefs that we develop about groups, which we then apply to individuals from that group. Stereotypes are schemata that are taken too far, as they reduce and ignore a person’s individuality and the diversity present within a larger group of people. Stereotypes can be based on cultural identities, physical appearance, behavior, speech, beliefs, and values, among other things, and are often caused by a lack of information about the target person or group (Guyll, Madon, Prieto & Scherr, 2010).  Stereotypes can be positive, negative, or neutral, but all run the risk of lowering the quality of communication.

While the negative effects of stereotypes are pretty straightforward in that they devalue people and prevent us from adapting and revising our schemata, positive stereotypes may also have negative consequences.

Since stereotypes are generally based on a lack of information, we must take it upon ourselves to gain exposure to new kinds of information and people, which will likely require us to step out of our comfort zones. When we do meet people, we should base our impressions on describable behavior rather than inferred or secondhand information. When stereotypes negatively influence our overall feelings and attitudes about a person or group, prejudiced thinking results.

Prejudice can have individual or widespread negative effects. At the individual level, a hiring manager may not hire a young woman with a physical disability, even though that would be illegal if it were the only reason. If pervasive cultural thinking believes people with physical disabilities are mentally deficient, this will lead hiring managers all over the country to make similar decisions, which is essentially social injustice.

Engage in Self-Reflection

A good way to improve  perception and increase  communication competence is to engage in self-reflection. If a communication encounter doesn’t go well and you want to know why, your understanding of the negative communication encounter will be clearer when you are self-aware and can recount your thoughts and actions.

Checking Perception

Perception checking is a strategy to help us monitor our reactions to and perceptions about people and communication. There are some internal and external strategies we can use to engage in perception checking. In terms of internal strategies, review the various influences on perception that we have learned about in this chapter and always be willing to ask yourself, “What is influencing my perceptions right now?” Even being aware of what influences are present, increases our awareness. In terms of external strategies, we can ask other people to help verify our perceptions.

The cautionary adage “Things aren’t always as they appear” is useful when evaluating your own perceptions. Sometimes it’s a good idea to bounce your thoughts off someone else, especially if your perceptions relate to a high-stakes situation.

The DIVE Method

• D = Describe
  • Describe the behavior or situation without evaluation or judgement.

• I = Interpret
  • Think of some possible interpretations for the behavior, being aware of attributions and other influences on the perception process.
• V =Verify
  • Verify what happened and ask for clarification from the other person’s perspective. Be aware that the other person likely experienced the event differently than you.
• E = Evaluate
  • Evaluate what you think happened based on your interpretations and verifications steps.

For more ideas on how to improve your self-perceptions check out this Ted Talk from Verna Myers on how to overcome our biases.

Myers, V. (2015). How to Overcome our Biases. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYyvbgINZkQ&t=536s