Taylor Holzfaster- Participation Paper #7

Taylor Holzfaster

Intercultural Comm

4/1/15

Participation Paper #7

Perception and Communication

            After sitting in class and learning about perception and communication, it caused me to take a step back and realize how many different views and perceptions there are about communication overall.

            There’s not just one proper way to communicate with people around you. People feel that role of voice, cultural differences, etc., play a role in how we communicate, but that’s where they’re wrong. Yes, cultural differences can cause problems with communication, however; realizing communication style is cultural and no culture is objective is the key to positive communication.

            There are many different “senses” when it comes to communication as well. You may wonder, what do we sense? We as humans focus on few things and tend to only pay attention to things that apply to us. For example, a study was taking about how people are exposed to 11 million different types of information, but we only actually pay attention and remember 40.

            Also, knowing the factors of perception is huge in communication. There are, prototypes, stereotypes, scripts, attributions, self-concepts, and the list could go on and on. Each one of these words is described as a schema. Which is a mental framework that creates meaningful patterns from stimuli.

            In conclusion, communication is subjective and errors that happen when the just of communication is not fully understood. Since culture isn’t objective, different cultures have different means of communicating and perceiving things that are done and said. By taking the time to realize the different aspects and perceptions of communication, it would cause people to consider what they say and how they say things more carefully.