Donovan Chew
Comm200s
January 23, 2016
Perception Exercise
A person’s pursuit of happiness in life could be based off the company they keep around them. You have to be aware of the friends you chose and want to experience the rest of your life with. To make that decision, you should apply the four types of cognitive schemata. Those friends that we have are based on our perception of them. I feel that my main clique of friends all have the same passion and drive that I have towards certain life goals. Even though we all come from a different environment and haven’t experienced life together as a whole yet, we have the same insight on a lot of ideas.
The first of the four cognitive schemata is prototype, which is the structure that defines the clearest or most representative example of some category (Wood, 1996, pg. 66). The way you make friends can come naturally just because of some of the traits that are automatically generated from each other. You try to find the ideal person that share personal interest which is ideally your prototype. One of my best friends, Aaron, is my closest prototype because we have a lot in common. We are both athletic, love sports and both photographers. Just those 3 things brings us that much closer than any other of my friends.
The second schemata, personal construct, what we use to measure a person or situation along a bipolar dimension of judgment (Wood, 1996, pg. 67). This is how we judge people by how they act and seeing what their ideals and beliefs are. When thinking about my friends, I primarily think about how they relate to my perception on certain ideas. There has to be some type of relation and agreements between us as we discuss certain things and have judgments on topics. We need not to judge each other if we were to have disbeliefs on something.
Stereotyping is the third of the schemata, a predictive generalization applied to a person or situation (Wood, 1996, pg. 67). This is basically categorizing a...