Comm + Society Module 2

Week 7 A

  • Identity

    • Categories a person identifies with

    • It is learned, not innate

    • Fixed and dynamic

    • Created by interaction

    • Understood within larger historical, social, and cultural environments

Elements of identity

  • Self-concept    

    • A person’s idea of their own self that is a combo of perceptions

    • Rarely changes over time

  • Self-esteem

    • Subjective positivity/negativity that a person holds about the perceptions about their own identity

  • Egocentrism

    • Excessive focus on oneself

  • Ethnocentrism

    • Excessive focus on the “correctness” of one’s own culture

    • Idea that one culture/way of life is better

Influences on identity

  • Race

    • Based on physical or biological features

  • Ethnicity

    • Shared traditions

    • Language, celebrations, shared belief, common history

  • Nationality

    • Refers to citizenship

  • Religious identity

    • Defined by one’s spiritual beliefs

    • Religiosity

      • A person’s degree of adherence to their faith

  • Age

    • Involves self-perception of age and what others understand that age to mean

  • Social class

    • Informal ranking of people based on income, occupation, area of living, etc.

  • Disability

    • Identification with impairments that impact daily life

  • Biological sex

    • Genetic, hormonal, chromosomal displays of maleness and femaleness

  • Gender

    • Preferential displays of male and female

    • Is learned

    • Androgynous

      • Someone who expresses traditionally masculine and feminine traits

    • Gender-fluid

      • Someone who doesn’t identify with the traditional models of masculinity of femineity

  • Sexual identity

    • Sexuality that someone identifies with (gay, straight, etc.)

Types of identity

  • Primary identities

    • Have the most consistent and enduring impact on our lives

    • Usually don’t change much

    • Ethnicity, age, etc.

  • Secondary identities

    • More changeable over the life span

    • Occupation, marital status, etc.

  • Intersectionality

    • How different identities combine to shape our experiences

Identity theories

  • Reflected appraisals

    • Self-images are primarily based on the ways others view them and from the messages they’ve received from others about who they are

    • Looking glass-self

      • The idea that self-image results from the images others reflect back to an individual

    • Confirming is the impact of positive reactions from others to one’s identity displays

    • Disconfirming is the impact of negative reactions from others to one’s identity displays

  • Social identity theory

    • People form their own self-concept based on the people they surround themselves with

    • People see themselves as similar to the group that they’re a part of

    • Particular others

      • Important people in a person’s life whose opinions and behavior affect aspect of their identity

    • Generalized dress

      • Combination of roles, rules, norms, beliefs, and attitudes

      • How to dress when going places

    • Reference group

      • Others to whom we compare ourselves to form our identity

  • Self-fulfilling prophecy    

    • The idea of “manifesting” things

    • The expectation of expecting something to occur increases the likelihood that it will through influence on behavior

    • Stereotype threat

      • Reminding someone of a stereotype might change their behavior

      • Saying women are bad at tests makes a woman do worse on a test

      • Saying black people are good athletes might make them a better athlete

  • Self-concept

    • Understanding of one’s unique characteristics as well as similarities and differences from others

    • Self-esteem

      • How one interprets reacted appraisals and social comparisons

  • Johari window

    • Highlights the information we know about ourselves and what others know about ourselves

    • Open quadrant

      • Known to self and others

    • Blind quadrant

      • Known to others but not the self

    • Hidden quadrant

      • Known to self but not others

    • Unknown quadrant

      • Unknown to both self and others

  • Dramaturgy

    • The idea that our behaviors and communication is us “performing” our identity that controls the images that others recieve about us

    • Impression management

      • A person’s acts/behaviors that cause other people to see that person the way the want to be seem

    • Audience

      • The people who the person is performing to

    • Front stage

      • The situation/context in which the person is playing the impression management role

    • Backstage

      • The person/context in which a person does not feel the need to perform

    • Wings

      • Things or people that aid in the successful performance of an individual

    • Props

      • Objects or items that help an individual more successfully perform

  • Performance

    • Claims we are who we are as a result of our repeated, patterned actions

      • Socially produces and socially performed

      • Identities are always in the process of becoming

    • Rituals are repeated patterns of human action that function to shape and define our identities

      • Who we are is a result of these repeated actions and patterns

    • Performativity

      • Process of repetition and actions that produce identity

        • Dress

        • Vocal and verbal communication

        • Gestures

        • Professionalism

  • Self-monitoring

    • Self-presentation

      • Influences other’s impressions by creating an image that is consistent with one’s personal identity

    • Enacting identities

      • Performing scripts deemed proper for particular identities

    • Role expectation

      • Expectation that one will perform in a particular way because of the social role occupied

      • Women professors are expected to reinforce and be nurturing

    • Self-monitoring

      • The act of someone paying attention to the ways they present themselves

      • Whether they are successful or not in presenting themselves in the desired way

Week 7B

  • Perception

    • How one sees the

What affects perceptual process?

  • Physical differences

    • Colorblindness

    • Deaf/hard at hearing

  • Personality and individual characteristics

    • Emotional state

    • Outlook

    • Knowledge

  • Cognitive complexity

    • The degree to which a person’s constructs are detailed, involved, or numerous

    • What are constructs?

      • Categories people develop to help them organize information

3 perceptual procedures that we go through

  • #1: Selection

    • Process of choosing which sensory info to focus on

      • Blocking out the “background noise” and focusing on the info you want to listen to

    • Selective attention

      • Consciously or unconsciously paying attention to the desired sensory information

    • Primary effect

      • Forming a judgement or opinion based on the first information received

      • Judging on first impressions

      • First time coming to college

    • Recency effect

      • Forming a judgement or opinion based on most recent information received

  • #2: Organization

    • Figure/ground

      • Deciding what is in the foreground and what is the background

    • Patterning

      • Trying to find patterns

    • Cognitive representation

      • Ability to form mental models of the world

    • Types of cognitive representation

      • Schemas are cognitive maps that help us organize information

      • Prototypes are a representative or idealized version of a concept

        • Using your mom as a prototype for all moms

      • Script is a relatively fixed sequence that acts as a guide/template for communication or behavior

        • Usually saying “Hi how are you” the first time you meet someone

    • Categorization    

      • Organizes information by placing it into larger groupings of information

      • A label is a name assigned to a category based on one’s perception of the category

      • Stereotyping is creating schemas that overgeneralize attributes of a group

  • #3: Interpretation

    • Attribution

      • Attribution theory

        • Explanation of the process we use to judge our own behavior with others’ behaviors

      • Attributional bias

        • Errors made when people try to find reasons for their own and others’ behaviors

      • Self-serving bias

        • Tendency to give oneself more credit when things go well

        • Not accepting enough responsibility when things go wrong

      • Fundamental attribution error

        • Attrubute others’ negative behavior to internal causes

        • Attribute others’ positive behaviors to external causes

      • Overattribution

        • Selecting an individual’s most obvious characteristic and using to to explain everything else

    • Frames

      • Assumptions and attitudes that we use to filter perceptions ad create meaning

      • First-order reality

        • The thing itself

      • Second-order reality

        • What the thing means

Perception and society

  • Social comparison

    • Ethnocentrism

      • Tendency to view one’s own group as the standard which all other groups are judged

      • My religion is right

    • Stereotypes

    • Prejudice

      • Negative feelings toward a person or people because of the group they belong to

      • Ego-defensive function

        • The role prejudice plays in protecting individuals’ self-worth

      • Value-expressive function

        • Role played by prejudice in allowing people to view their norms/values as correct

        • When segregation happened, people just viewed it as a normal way of life

  • Power

    • Shaped by the ideology that serves the interests of those who already have power

  • Culture

  • History

  • Social roles

Perception and identity

  • Social construction

    • Reality emerges through our actions and that our world is a product of communication

      • Blank slate theory

        • Life experiences create reality and the receiver is passive

      • Construction theory

        • The receiver is active in creating reality

        • The person chooses how the action affects them

      • Symbolic interaction

        • The self is a product of the messages that they’ve encountered/past experiences

      • Impression management

        • Trying to manage what others think of us

  • Cultural location

    • Provides a way of seeing oneself within social categories

      • Always mediated or sustained by power

    • Mythical norm

      • Those who occupy positions of power and that they are the “norm”, “average”, or “typical” is a myth

      • Stereotyping about what the norm is based on a model

  • Cultural location and positionality

    • Positionality

      • Where we stand in relation to various categories/elements of difference

      • Markers that make us different like race, ability, etc.

      • Unintentionally shapes our identities and perceptions

    • Essentialist perspective

      • Assumptions people are their positionality

        • We make stereotypes about people that allow us to think they are “predictable”

    • Standpoint theory

      • Theory that we occupy relationships with one another within systems of power

      • The person with less privilege has more understanding of power

      • People with more power don’t realize the magnitude of power

  • Communication and reality

    • There are many different versions of reality which are all based on objective truths

    • There is no one reality!

Week 8A

  • Characteristics of culture

    • Learned (not innate)

    • Created

    • Rule governed (not law governed)

    • Comprised of symbol systems

    • Changing

    • Ethnocentric

    • Distinctive

  • Culture and rules

    • Rules, not laws, are what governs human behavior

    • Rules can be broken, laws cannot be broken

    • A law is something like the law of gravity

    • A rule can be something like a stop sign

  • Characteristics of rules

    • Followable

    • Prescriptive

    • Behavior-specific

    • Contextual

  • Ways to study culture

    • Emic approach

      • Interpretive

      • From within

    • Etic approach

      • As an observer

  • Ethnography

    • Describes culturally distinctive patterns of communication    

      • Use of artifacts

      • Rules

      • Stories

      • Rituals

    • Emic approach

      • Researchers spend time living among a culture of people

    • Ethnographer must make a phenomenon anthropologically strange

  • Cultural dichotomies    

    • Elaborated codes vs. restrictive codes

      • Compares complex, context-dependent sentences and short, simple, implicit sentences

    • Individualism vs. collectivism

      • Focuses on personal independence/goals vs. group harmony/obligations

      • Super bowl vs. MVP

    • High context vs low context

      • Messages rely on context to be understood

    • Horizontal vs. vertical relationships

      • Contrasts equality among members against hierarchical, status-driven relationships

    • High vs low power distance

      • Acceptance of authority gaps vs questioning of hierarchy

Week 8B

  • Community is a group of people who

    • Live in a certain area

      • Chicagoans

    • Share a culturally marked identity

      • Black community

    • Share similar interests

      • People who like playing Pokémon

  • Diaspora

    • Movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland

  • Types of communities

    • Homogeneous is when the people are all the same

    • Heterogeneous is when the people are all different

  • Elements of community

    • Values

      • What people consider good and bad

      • What people consider important in their lives

    • Norms

      • Typical behaviors in a community

    • Beliefs

      • Things that community members hold to be true

  • Intercultural communication

    • Communication that occurs in interactions between people of different cultures

    • Border dwellers

      • People who live between cultures and therefore experience contradictory patterns

      • People who travel

      • Co-cultural groups

      • Intercultural relationships

  • Travel

    • Culture shock

    • Reverse culture shock    

      • Experiencing culture shock when returning back home

  • Socialization

    • People who grow up living on the borders between cultural groups

    • Co-cultural group

      • A significant minority group within a dominant majority that holds different values and/or communication patterns

    • Cultural limbo

      • Not being “enough” for either culture

  • Relationships

    • People who have an intimate partner from a different cultural background

  • Gender, culture, and communication

    • Tannen’s Thesis    

      • Talk between men and women is cross-cultural communication because boys and girls grow up in different cultures

      • We create masculinity and femineity as a way of acting “natural”

  • Men

    • Independence

    • Individuals

    • Social status/hierarchy of men

  • Women

    • Intimacy

    • Relationships

    • Connections

      • Everyone on the same level

Star Trek Episode

  • What is this episode about?

    • A human and alien ship forming an agreement

    • Mission to explore strange new worlds

    • The humans try to find out how the aliens communicate to each other

  • How might you illustrate any of the characteristics of culture we have discussed via this episode?

    • Intercultural communication    

      • Communication between humans and aliens from different cultures

    • Elaborative vs. restrictive codes

      • They need context to understand the people/characters the aliens are talking about

    • Patterning    

      • The humans try to find patterns in the way the humans communicate

    • Attribution theory     

      • They keep trying to make guesses about why the aliens brought Picard to the surface with Dathon

    • Hidden quadrant

      • The aliens know what they’re saying but not the humans

    • Emic

      • Picard was doing emic

    • Etic

      • Troy and Data were doing an etic

  • How does Picard attempt to connect with and understand Dathon? What does this tell us about verbal and nonverbal codes?

    • He assumes that Dathon wants to fight when he holds a knife out at him

    • He starts trying to talk like Dathon is talking

    • When Dathon gives him the knife after Tanagra is revealed, he understands that he may have to defend himself

    • He uses words that Dathon said in previous situations to understand their meaning in a context

    • He uses a visual analogy to try to understand what Dathon means

    • He starts to understand that Dathon is using metaphors

  • At the end of the episode, Picard is reading something. What is he reading, why is he reading it?

  • Why can’t they communicate even though they are both speaking English?    

    • They need to understand the context behind the words they’re saying

  • How does Picard attempt to connect with and understand Dathon?

    • He repeats it and remembers the context of the last time he said it

    • He uses nonverbal communication

  • Other examples of cultural differences interfering with communication

    • Different language

  • Can you think of another example of modern communication that is very steeped in culture?

    • Memes

Exam 2 Review