Real Communication An Introduction

Chapter 2  Perceiving the Self and Others 45

facts. Although we often associate prejudice with race and ethnicity, such snap
judgments about people may also be based on any type of group membership
(for example, gender, social class, age, religion, disability). It can take even very
limited visual or communication cues to trigger these prejudices. For example,
one of the stars of the aforementioned TV show Duck Dynasty was escorted
out of a New York City hotel when he asked to find the restroom. The hotel
staff assumed that his long, scruffy beard meant that he was a “homeless” person
rather than a paying guest! The staff no doubt also committed the fundamental
attribution error, discussed earlier in this chapter, by assuming a set of negative
personal traits that goes along with being homeless (or bearded). We’ll discuss
these perceptual errors further—and ways to remove them—in Chapter 5.

Cognitions About Ourselves

Imagine spending the first nineteen years of your life without an official first
name. That’s what “Baby Boy” Pauson did. His father disappeared and his
mother never got around to picking a name for his birth certificate. People
referred to him as Max (after his mother, Maxine), yet his official records still
noted his legal name as “Baby Boy.” Tormented, teased, and bounced around
for years, Pauson perceived himself as an outcast and escaped through comic
books, animation, and fantasy. It wasn’t until he entered San Francisco’s School
of the Arts that he discovered that others valued his creativity and nonconfor-
mity. He finally found a lawyer who helped him create an official identity with
the weighty name he had imagined for himself as a child—Maximus Julius
Pauson (Eckholm, 2010).
For most of us, our name (or nickname) is an important element in our
cognitions, or thoughts about ourselves. For example, many women who marry
debate whether to change their last names: some worry that losing the last name
they were born with might signify the loss of a personal identity; others see
changing their name as a way to communicate their relationship status or signify
a new family identity. We introduce ourselves using the names we prefer (our
full name, a nickname, or a moniker like “coach” or “doc”), based on the way
we perceive ourselves and want others to perceive us. Though you may not have
struggled with your name, you—like all people—have certainly struggled with
the challenge of understanding and projecting your identity in order to become
a more competent communicator. Three important influences on our thoughts
about ourselves are self-concept, self-esteem, and self-efficacy (see Figure 2.2).
We discuss each of these in turn.

Knowledge

of the self

Feelings

about

the self

Prediction of

success for

the self

COGNITION =++SELF-CONCEPT SELF-ESTEEM SELF-EFFICACY

(about the self)

FIGURE 2.2

UNDERSTANDING

COGNITION