Mechanisms of perception and the development of social skills. What is social perception for a person and groups of people in psychology Perceptual organs

Perception (this word means “perception” in Latin) is the cognitive process of a person’s active direct reflection of various objects, phenomena, events and situations. If such cognition is aimed at social objects and effects, then this phenomenon is called social perception. A variety of mechanisms of social perception can be observed every day in everyday life.

Description

Mentions of such a psychological phenomenon as perception were found in the ancient world. Philosophers, physicists, physiologists and even artists made a great contribution to the development of this concept. But the greatest importance is attached to this concept in psychology.

Perception is the most important mental function of cognition, manifested in the form of a complex process of receiving and transforming sensory information. Thanks to perception, the individual forms a complete image of the object, which affects the analyzers. In other words, perception is a form of sensory mapping. This phenomenon includes such characteristics as the identification of individual signs, the correct selection of information, the formation and accuracy of a sensory image.

Perception is always associated with attention, logical thinking, and memory. It always depends on motivation and has a certain emotional overtones. The properties of any type of perception include structure, objectivity, apperception, contextuality and meaningfulness.

This phenomenon is being intensively studied not only by representatives of various branches of psychology, but also by physiologists, cybernetics, and other scientists. In their differential studies, they widely use methods such as experiment, modeling, observation, and empirical analysis.

Understanding what the functions, structure, and mechanisms of social perception are is not only of general but also practical importance for psychology. This phenomenon plays a major role in the creation of information systems, in artistic design, in sports, teaching and many other areas of human activity.

Factors

Perceptual factors are both internal and external. External factors include intensity, size, novelty, contrast, repetition, movement, and recognition.

Internal factors include:

Interaction with society through perception

Another concept widely used in psychology and related sciences is such a type of our perception as social perception. This is the name given to a person’s assessment and understanding of other people and himself, as well as other social objects. Such objects may include various groups and social communities. This term appeared in 1947, and was introduced by psychologist D. Bruner. The appearance of this concept in psychology allowed scientists to look at the tasks and problems of human perception in a completely different way.

People are social creatures. Throughout life, any person comes into contact with other people a huge number of times, forming a variety of interpersonal relationships. Individual groups of people also form close bonds. Therefore, each person is the subject of a huge number of very different relationships.

A positive or negative attitude towards people around us directly depends on our perception, as well as on how we evaluate our communication partners. Usually, during communication, we first evaluate the appearance, and then the behavior of our partner. As a result of this assessment, we form a certain attitude and make preliminary assumptions about the psychological qualities of the interlocutor.

Social perception can come in several forms. So, in most cases, social perception is the perception of the person himself. Any individual perceives himself, as well as his own or someone else’s group. There is also the perception of group members. This includes perception within the boundaries of one’s own community or members of an out-group. The third type of social perception is group perception. The group can perceive both its own person and members of another community. The last type of social perception examines one group's perception of an outgroup.

The process of such perception itself can be depicted in the form of evaluative activity. We evaluate a person’s psychological characteristics, his appearance, actions and deeds. As a result, we form a definite opinion about the observed person and form a clear idea of ​​his possible behavioral reactions.

Mechanisms

Perception is always a process of predicting the feelings and actions of people around us. To fully understand this process, knowledge of the peculiarities of the functioning of its mechanisms is required.

The mechanisms of social perception are shown in the following table:

Name	Definition	Examples
Stereotyping	A persistent image or idea of ​​people, phenomena, which is characteristic of all representatives of one social group	Many people believe that the Germans are terrible pedants, the military are straightforward, and beautiful people are often narcissistic
Identification	Intuitive identification and cognition of an individual or group in situations of direct or indirect communication. In this case, a comparison or comparison of the internal states of the partners arises	People make assumptions about their partner’s state of mind, trying to mentally become them themselves.
Empathy	Emotional empathy for others, the ability to understand another person by providing emotional support and getting used to their experiences	This mechanism is considered a necessary condition for the successful work of psychotherapists, doctors and teachers.
Reflection	Self-knowledge through interaction with another person. It becomes possible thanks to the individual’s ability to imagine how his communication partner sees him	Let's imagine a dialogue between hypothetical Sasha and Petya. At least 6 “roles” are involved in such communication: Sasha, as he is; Sasha, how he sees himself; Sasha, as Petya sees him. And these same roles from Petya
Attraction	Knowing another person based on a strong positive feeling. Thanks to attraction, people not only learn to understand their communication partner, but also form rich emotional relationships	Psychologists distinguish these types of this perceptual mechanism: love, sympathy and friendship
Causal attribution	This is the process of predicting the actions and feelings of others. Without understanding something, a person begins to attribute his behavior	Without understanding something, a person begins to attribute his behavior, feelings, personality traits, motives to other people

The peculiarity of interpersonal cognition is that it takes into account not only various physical characteristics, but also behavioral characteristics. If the subject of such perception actively participates in communication, then he establishes a coordinated interaction with his partner. Therefore, social perception is highly dependent on the motives, emotions, opinions, prejudices, attitudes and passions of both partners. In social perception there is also necessarily a subjective assessment of another person.

Does our perception depend on society?

In interpersonal perception there are various gender, class, age, professional, and individual differences. It is known that young children perceive a person by appearance, paying special attention to his clothing, as well as the presence of special paraphernalia. Students also first evaluate teachers by their appearance, but teachers perceive students by their internal qualities. Similar differences occur between managers and subordinates.

Professional affiliation is also important for perception. For example, teachers perceive people by their ability to conduct a conversation, but, say, a coach pays attention to a person’s anatomy, as well as how he moves.

Social perception is highly dependent on the previous evaluation of our object of perception. In an interesting experiment, teaching evaluations of 2 groups of students were recorded. The first group consisted of “favorite” students, and the second group consisted of “unloved” students. Moreover, the “favorite” children deliberately made mistakes when performing the task, while the “unloved” children solved it correctly. However, the teacher, despite this, assessed the “favorite” children positively and negatively the “unloved” children. The attribution of any characteristics is always carried out according to the following model: people with a negative characteristic are assigned negative actions, and positive people - good ones.

First impression

Psychologists have found out which factors cause the most powerful impression in the process of social perception. It turned out that people usually pay attention first to the hairstyle, then to the eyes, and then to the facial expression of the stranger. Therefore, if you smile cordially at your interlocutors when meeting you, they will perceive you friendly and will be more positive.

There are 3 main factors that influence how a person's first opinion is formed: attitude, attractiveness and superiority.

“Superiority” is observed when a person, who is superior to a particular person in some way, is rated much higher in other characteristics. There is a global revision of the assessed personality. Moreover, this factor is most strongly influenced by the observer’s uncertain behavior. Therefore, in extreme
situation, almost all people are able to trust those whom they would not have approached before.

“Attractiveness” explains the peculiarities of perception for a partner who is attractive in appearance. The perceptual error here is that people around him who are attractive in appearance are often greatly overestimated in terms of his social and psychological properties.

“Attitude” considers the perception of a partner depending on our attitude towards him. The perceptual error in this case is that we tend to overestimate those who treat us well or share our opinion.

How to Develop Perceptual Skills

D. Carnegie believes that mutual strong sympathy and effective friendly communication arise through a simple smile. Therefore, to develop perceptual skills, he suggests, first of all, learning to smile correctly. To do this, you need to perform exercises specially developed by this psychologist every day in front of the mirror. Facial expressions give us real information about a person’s experiences, so by learning to control our facial expressions, we improve our social perception skills.

You can also use the Ekman technique to learn to recognize emotional expressions and develop social perception skills. This method consists of identifying 3 zones on the human face (nose with the area around it, forehead with eyes, mouth with chin). The manifestation of 6 leading emotional states (these include joy, anger, surprise, fear, disgust and sadness) is noted in these zones, which allows each person to recognize and decipher the facial expressions of another person. This perceptual technique has become widespread not only in ordinary communication situations, but also in psychotherapeutic practice of interaction with pathological individuals.

So, perception is the most complex mechanism of psychological interaction between a person and the object he perceives. This interaction occurs under the influence of a huge number of factors. The characteristics of perception are age characteristics, a person’s life experience, specific effects, as well as various personal properties.

Social psychology is a science that studies the mechanisms and patterns of behavior and activity of people, determined by their inclusion in social groups and communities, as well as the psychological characteristics of these groups and communities

Psychology is generally understood as the science of human behavior, and social psychology as the branch of that science that deals with human interaction. The primary task of science is to establish general laws through systematic observation. Social psychologists develop such general laws to describe and explain human interaction.

The very combination of the words “social psychology” indicates the specific place that this discipline occupies in the system of scientific knowledge. Having emerged at the intersection of the sciences - psychology and sociology, social psychology still retains its special status, which leads to the fact that each of the “parent” disciplines quite willingly includes it as an integral part. This ambiguity in the position of a scientific discipline has many different reasons. The main one is the objective existence of such a class of facts of social life, which themselves can be studied only with the help of the combined efforts of two sciences: psychology and sociology. On the one hand, any social phenomenon has its own “psychological” aspect, since social patterns manifest themselves only through the activities of people, and people act, being endowed with consciousness and will.

On the other hand, in situations of joint activity of people, completely special types of connections arise between them, connections of communication and interaction, and their analysis is impossible outside the system of psychological knowledge.

The relevance of the topic is due to the fact that the process of perception by one person of another acts as an obligatory component of communication and can conditionally be called the perceptual side of communication.

The object of the study is the interaction of people with each other through the perceptual side of communication.

The subject of the study is social perception as a socio-psychological aspect of interaction.

The purpose of the work is to study the structure and mechanisms of social perception.

Concept of social perception

social perception facial expressions openness

The emergence and successful development of interpersonal communication is possible only if there is mutual understanding between its participants. The extent to which people reflect each other's traits and feelings, perceive and understand others, and through them themselves, largely determines the process of communication, the relationships that develop between partners, and the ways in which they carry out joint activities. Thus, the process of cognition and understanding by one person of another acts as an obligatory component of communication; conditionally, it can be called the perceptual side of communication.

Social perception is one of the most complex and important concepts in social psychology. One could even argue that it is one of the most significant contributions of social psychology to modern and promising Human psychology.

Its closeness to the general psychological concept of “perception” is limited by the name, the most general everyday meanings and the fact that both of them are related to the mechanisms and phenomena of human perception of various phenomena. This is where the similarities end. Perception is a theoretical concept that characterizes an artificially selected fragment of the holistic process of cognition and subjective understanding of the World by a person. Social perception is a complex, multi-component concept that tries to explain the unique phenomenon of cognition and understanding by people of each other.

The concept of social perception was first introduced by J. Bruner in 1947, when a new view of the perception of a person by a person was developed.

Social perception is a process that occurs when people interact with each other and includes the perception, study, understanding and evaluation of social objects by people: other people, themselves, groups or social communities.

The concept of “social perception” includes everything that in the general psychological approach is usually designated by various terms and studied separately, then trying to create a holistic picture of a person’s mental world from pieces:

– own process of perception of observed behavior;

– interpretation of the perceived causes of behavior and expected consequences;

– emotional assessment;

– building a strategy for your own behavior.

Concept of perception

Definition 1

Perception is a cognitive process of direct active reflection by a person of various phenomena, objects, events, situations.

If this cognition is aimed at social objects, then the phenomenon is called social perception. The mechanisms of social perception can be observed every day in our daily lives.

Mention of perception was already found in the ancient world. Philosophers, physiologists, artists, and physicists made a huge contribution to the development of this concept. But psychology attaches the greatest importance to this concept.

Perception is an important mental function of cognition, which manifests itself as a complex process of transforming and receiving sensory information. Through perception, the individual forms a complete image of the object, which affects the analyzers. Thus, perception is a unique form of sensory display.

Characteristics and properties of perception

This phenomenon has the following main characteristics:

• identification of individual signs;
• correct absorption of information;
• formation of an accurate sensory image.

Perception is associated with logical thinking, attention and memory. It depends on a person’s motivation and has a certain type of emotional overtones.

Basic properties of perception:

• structure,
• apperception,
• objectivity,
• contextuality,
• meaningfulness.

Perceptual factors

Perceptual factors are of two types:

• internal,
• external.

External factors include:

• intensity,
• size,
• novelty,
• contrast,
• repeatability,
• movement,
• recognition.

Internal factors of perception include:

• motivation, which lies in the fact that a person sees what he considers important or what he strongly needs;
• settings of personal perception, when an individual expects to see what he saw previously in a similar situation;
• experience that enables a person to perceive what past experience has taught him;
• characterological features of personality.

Interaction with society through perception

The concept of a variety of our perception - social perception - is widely used in psychology.

Definition 2

Social perception is a person’s understanding and evaluation of himself, other people, and other social objects.

This term was introduced in 1947 by psychologist D. Bruner. The introduction of this concept into psychology allowed scientists to look differently at the problems and tasks of human perception. Man is a social being and is the subject of a large number of different relationships. An individual’s positive or negative attitude towards other people depends on the perception and assessment of communication partners.

Social perception comes in several forms:

• human perception;
• perceptions by group members;
• group perception.

Mechanisms of social perception

Perception has certain features of the functioning of its mechanisms. The following mechanisms of social perception exist:

• stereotyping, which is the formation of a persistent image or idea of ​​people and phenomena characteristic of all representatives of one social group;
• identification, expressed in intuitive identification and cognition of an individual or group in a communication situation, in which a comparison or juxtaposition of the internal states of partners occurs;
• empathy, which implies emotional empathy for others, the ability to understand other people by providing them with emotional support and getting used to their experiences;
• reflection, that is, self-knowledge through interaction with other people;
• attraction - knowledge of other people based on a positive, persistent feeling;
• causal attribution, which is the process of predicting the feelings and actions of surrounding people.

The specificity of interpersonal cognition is that it takes into account both various physical characteristics and behavioral characteristics. Therefore, social perception has a huge dependence on the emotions, motives, opinions, attitudes, and prejudices of both partners. In social perception there is also a subjective assessment of another person.

Perception is a complex mechanism of psychological interaction between an individual and the object he perceives. This interaction occurs under the influence of a large number of factors.

Social perception is a person’s figurative perception of himself, other people and social phenomena of the surrounding world. The image exists at the level of feelings (sensations, perceptions, ideas) and at the level of thinking (concepts, judgments, inferences).

The term “social perception” was first introduced by J. Bruner in 1947 and was understood as the social determination of perceptual processes.

Social perception includes interpersonal perception (the perception of a person by a person), which consists of the perception of a person’s external signs, their correlation with personal qualities, interpretation and prediction of future actions. The expression “knowledge of another person” is often used as a synonym in Russian psychology, says A. A. Bodalev. The use of such an expression is justified by including his behavioral characteristics in the process of perceiving another, forming an idea of ​​the intentions, abilities, attitudes of the person perceived, etc.

The process of social perception includes two sides: subjective (the subject of perception is the person who perceives) and objective (the object of perception is the person who is perceived). Through interaction and communication, social perception becomes mutual. At the same time, mutual knowledge is aimed primarily at understanding those qualities of a partner that are most significant for the participants in communication at a given moment in time.

The difference between social perception: social objects are not passive and indifferent in relation to the subject of perception. Social images always have semantic and evaluative characteristics. The interpretation of another person or group depends on the previous social experience of the subject, on the behavior of the object, on the system of value orientations of the perceiver and other factors.

The subject of perception can be either an individual or a group. If an individual acts as a subject, then he can perceive:

1) another individual belonging to his group;

2) another individual belonging to an out-group;

3) your group;

4) another group.

If a group acts as the subject of perception, then, according to G. M. Andreeva, the following is added:

1) the group’s perception of its own member;

2) the group’s perception of a representative of another group;

3) the group’s perception of itself;

4) the group’s perception as a whole of another group.

In groups, people’s individual ideas about each other are formalized into group personality assessments, which appear in the process of communication in the form of public opinion.

There are mechanisms of social perception - the ways in which people interpret, understand and evaluate another person. The most common mechanisms are the following: empathy, attraction, causal attribution, identification, social reflection.

IDENTIFICATION(Identification; Identifizierang) - a psychological process in which a person is partially or completely dissimilated from himself (see assimilation). An unconscious projection by a person of himself onto something other than himself: another person, business, or location. In other words, it is the subject's unconscious identification of himself with another subject, group, process or ideal. Is an important part of normal development. Empathy - comprehension of the emotional state of another person, understanding his emotions, feelings and experiences. In many psychological sources, empathy is identified with sympathy, empathy, and sympathy. This is not entirely true, since you can understand the emotional state of another person, but not treat him with sympathy and empathy. Well understanding the views and associated feelings of other people that he does not like, a person often acts contrary to them. A student in class, annoying an unloved teacher, can perfectly understand the latter’s emotional state and use the power of his empathy against the teacher. People we call manipulators very often have well-developed empathy and use it for their own, often selfish, purposes. The subject is able to understand the meaning of the experiences of another because he himself once experienced the same emotional states. However, if a person has never experienced such feelings, then it is much more difficult for him to comprehend their meaning. If an individual has never experienced affect, depression or apathy, then he most likely will not understand what another person is experiencing in this state, although he may have certain cognitive ideas about such phenomena. To comprehend the true meaning of another's feelings, it is not enough to have cognitive representations. Personal experience is also necessary. Therefore, empathy as the ability to understand the emotional state of another person develops throughout life and may be more pronounced in older people. It is quite natural that close people have more developed empathy towards each other than people who have known each other relatively recently. People from different cultures may have little empathy for each other. At the same time, there are people who have special insight and are able to understand the experiences of another person even if he tries to carefully hide them. There are some types of professional activities that require developed empathy, for example, medical practice, teaching, and theater. Almost any professional activity in the “person-to-person” sphere requires the development of this perception mechanism.

REFLECTION - in social psychology, reflection is understood as imitation of the course of reasoning of another person. More often, reflection is understood as thinking about YOUR mental actions or mental states. Attraction - a special form of perception and cognition of another person, based on the formation of a stable positive feeling towards him. Through positive feelings of sympathy, affection, friendship, love, etc. Certain relationships arise between people that allow them to know each other more deeply. According to the figurative expression of the representative of humanistic psychology A. Maslow, such feelings allow you to see a person “under the sign of eternity,” i.e. see and understand the best and most worthy that is in him. Attraction as a mechanism of social perception is usually considered in three aspects: the process of forming the attractiveness of another person; the result of this process; quality of relationships. The result of this mechanism is a special type of social attitude toward another person, in which the emotional component predominates. Attraction can only exist at the level of individually selective interpersonal relationships, characterized by mutual attachment of their subjects. There are probably various reasons why we tend to like some people more than others. Emotional attachment can arise on the basis of common views, interests, value orientations, or as a selective attitude towards a person’s special appearance, behavior, character traits, etc. The interesting thing is that such relationships allow you to better understand the other person. With a certain degree of convention, we can say that the more we like a person, the more we know him and the better we understand his actions (unless, of course, we are talking about pathological forms of attachment). Attraction is also significant in business relationships. Therefore, most business psychologists recommend that interpersonal communication professionals express the most positive attitude towards clients, even if they do not really like them. Externally expressed goodwill has the opposite effect - the attitude can actually change to positive. Thus, the specialist develops an additional mechanism of social perception, which allows him to obtain more information about a person. However, it should be remembered that excessive and artificial expression of joy does not so much create attraction as destroy people’s trust. A friendly attitude cannot always be expressed through a smile, especially if it looks fake and too stable. Thus, a television presenter smiling for an hour and a half is unlikely to attract the sympathy of viewers. ^ The mechanism of causal attribution associated with attributing reasons for behavior to a person. Each person has their own assumptions about why the perceived individual behaves in a certain way. Attributing certain reasons for behavior to another, the observer does this either on the basis of the similarity of his behavior with some familiar person or known image of a person, or on the basis of an analysis of his own motives assumed in a similar situation. The principle of analogy, similarity with something already familiar or the same applies here. It is curious that causal attribution can “work” even when the analogy is made with a person that does not exist and has never really existed, but exists in the observer’s imagination, for example, with an artistic image (the image of a character from a book or film). Each person has a huge number of ideas about other people and images, which were formed not only as a result of meetings with specific people, but also under the influence of various artistic sources. On a subconscious level, these images occupy “equal positions” with the images of people who actually exist or actually existed. The mechanism of causal attribution is associated with certain aspects of the self-perception of an individual who perceives and evaluates another. Thus, if a subject has attributed negative traits and the reasons for their manifestation to another, then he will most likely evaluate himself by contrast as a bearer of positive traits. Sometimes people with low self-esteem show excessive criticality towards others, thereby creating a certain negative subjectively perceived social background, against which, as it seems to them, they look quite decent. In fact, these are only subjective sensations that arise as a psychological defense mechanism. At the level of social stratification, such intergroup relations as the choice of an outgroup and the strategy of social creativity are, of course, accompanied by the action of causal attribution. T. Shibutani spoke about the degree of criticality and goodwill that it is advisable to observe in relation to others. After all, every person has positive and negative traits, as well as behavioral characteristics determined by his ambivalence as an individual, personality and subject of activity. In addition, the same qualities are assessed differently in different situations. Attribution of causes of behavior can occur taking into account the externality and internality of both the one who attributes and the one to whom it is attributed. If the observer is predominantly external, then the reasons for the behavior of the individual whom he perceives will appear to him in external circumstances. If it is internal, then the interpretation of the behavior of others will be associated with internal, individual and personal reasons. Knowing in what respects an individual is external and in which he is internal, it is possible to determine some features of his interpretation of the reasons for the behavior of other people. A person’s perception also depends on his ability to put himself in the place of another, to identify himself with him. In this case, the process of cognition of the other will go more successfully (if there are significant grounds for appropriate identification). The process and result of such identification is called identification. Identification as a socio-psychological phenomenon is considered by modern science very often and in such different contexts that it is necessary to specifically stipulate the features of this phenomenon as a mechanism of social perception. In this aspect, identification is similar to empathy, but empathy can be considered as an emotional identification of the subject of observation, which is possible on the basis of past or present experience of similar experiences. As for identification, here there is a greater degree of intellectual identification, the results of which are the more successful the more accurately the observer has determined the intellectual level of the one he perceives. The professional activities of some specialists are associated with the need for identification, such as the work of an investigator or teacher, which has been repeatedly described in legal and educational psychology. Misidentification when misjudging the intellectual level of another person can lead to negative professional results. Thus, a teacher who overestimates or underestimates the intellectual level of his students will not be able to correctly assess the connection between the students’ real and potential abilities during the learning process. It should be noted that the word “identification” in psychology means a whole series of phenomena that are not identical to each other: the process of comparing objects based on essential features (in cognitive psychology), the unconscious process of identifying close people and the mechanism of psychological defense (in psychoanalytic concepts), one from socialization mechanisms, etc. In a broad sense, identification as a mechanism of social perception, combined with empathy, is a process of understanding, seeing another, comprehending the personal meanings of another’s activities, carried out through direct identification or an attempt to put oneself in the place of another. By perceiving and interpreting the world around us and other people, a person also perceives and interprets himself, his own actions and motivations. The process and result of a person’s self-perception in a social context is called social reflection. As a mechanism of social perception, social reflection means the subject’s understanding of his own individual characteristics and how they manifest themselves in external behavior; awareness of how he is perceived by other people. One should not think that people are able to perceive themselves more adequately than those around them. Thus, in a situation where there is an opportunity to look at oneself from the outside - in a photograph or film, many remain very dissatisfied with the impression made by their own image. This happens because people have a somewhat distorted self-image. Distorted ideas even concern the appearance of the perceiver, not to mention the social manifestations of the internal state.

Why do we perceive a person this way? How is our attitude towards people formed?

When contacting people, we, without noticing it ourselves, evaluate each of them and draw conclusions about the person himself and his qualities. At the same time, no matter who we communicate with and whatever the duration of this contact, the process of perception of one individual by another always starts. How to understand another and, on the basis of knowledge, build exactly those relationships that are necessary with this person is one of the main questions of psychology.

Definition

The concept of social perception can be characterized as follows: it is the perception of one social unit by another. Psychology shows us the mechanisms by which we communicate, build relationships, characterize and understand what to expect from a person, not only based on his personal qualities, but also assessing his social affiliation. To do this, our subconscious takes as a basis a system of social stereotypes - stable ideas that arise within one of the social communities - a group.

Since social perception is most often considered as communication between individuals, psychologists have identified interpersonal perception as a special case. Interpersonal perception is determined by the emotional manifestations and ideas of interacting people.

Psychological characteristics of interpersonal interaction are based on an emotional basis. It includes various types of phenomena, including emotional reactions of the individual, such as affects, feelings, emotions.

Since a person is constantly in interaction with other people both in his social group and outside it, phenomena of social perception arise. According to psychologists, people from the same social group will have similar reactions to the same situation, will give the same assessment and be guided by similar criteria, since they have a common perception scale and rating systems.

This is why difficulties often arise for children who move from one school to another. At first, the class into which the newcomer finds himself perceives him as a subject from an alien social group, while almost all children react to him in the same way: they look closely, study. At the same time, in order to join the team, a new student will have to not only learn to be like everyone else, but also, first of all, turn on the mechanism of cognition through interest in the group in which he builds communication.

Where Perception Leads

Communication as a social perception can be implemented in the form:

1. Exchange of information.

2. Emotional exchange.

3. Development of a unified information context. Interpersonal perceptions are formed on the basis of stereotypes. In this case, the features that prevent individuals from objectively perceiving each other’s personalities form the following effects of social perception.

• The primacy effect. Only after meeting a person do we form our opinion based on already available information: what he looks like, how he speaks, etc.
• The effect of novelty - new information appeared, and suddenly “eyes were opened.” The new information seemed to erase the old one or thoroughly correct it. In this case, a sharp change in attitude towards the person may occur. The perceiver will suddenly see something good in him or take off his rose-colored glasses.
• The halo effect is the same case when, no matter what they tell you about a person, you will not believe anyone and will not change your opinion about him.
• Projection effect - we attribute our own qualities to a person, artificially “improving” or “worsening” him at the expense of them.
• The average error effect is possible when you have not yet made a final decision about what your attitude towards a person is - in this case, you temporarily neutralize the traits and qualities of this person as much as possible.

Types of social perception:

• Self-knowledge - the individual perceives and knows himself.
• Individual - perception between two individuals - in this case they are in the process of getting to know each other.
• A person’s perception of a group, while the process of perception and cognition occurs between the individual and the social group and all its members.
• Interpersonal group - cognition both within each group and between its members.

Science identifies the following most important functions of social perception:

1. Self-knowledge - a person’s self-perception and self-esteem of himself.

2. Knowing another individual.

3. Establishing contacts in the team when carrying out joint activities.

How do perceptual mechanisms work?

Relationships are based on mechanisms of social perception. They are based on interest and the need to interact constantly or from time to time. These are the following communication tools.

Identification - we recognize an object by becoming like it. When someone tells you, “Stand in my place,” it is a call for identification. Of course, this is not the only way of perception, but it is most often used in the process of communication. Identification is very close to empathy.

Attraction - to understand what this incomprehensible word means, it’s enough to say: sympathy, friendship, love. These three levels of positive feelings are its components. Sympathy is more neutral, friendship, in turn, is individualized and reveals attachments. Love is the highest degree of emotionally positive relationship; acts through mechanisms of crowding out other interests of the individual and concentrating his attention on the object of feelings.

Reflection. Try to imagine what, for example, your mother, friend, neighbor thinks about you. Through reflection, you get to know both yourself and the person for whom you are carrying out the process of reflection. Accordingly, the more people you communicate with, the more diverse your ideas about yourself (unless, of course, you deny the opinions of others about yourself) and about others. If you want an honest and open relationship, include your partner among those through whose eyes you look at yourself, make him a part of your inner world and a source of self-knowledge.

It is most interesting to consider the work of these mechanisms within the framework of the teacher-student relationship. How does pedagogical social perception work? For any teacher, it is necessary not only to emphasize his status, but also not to alienate the student.

Including the mechanisms of perception within the framework of the educational process is the main task of the teacher. You can show children how they work without using complex terminology. The concepts of perception and apperception are different.

If perception is a more primitive manifestation of the unconscious, unconscious perception of internal processes and surrounding objects, then apperception is a clear, meaningful category of perception, it is associated with past spiritual experience, and is based on human knowledge and abilities. That is, it is a conscious act of cognition of a person, and his perception is based on worldview and experience.

And if the essence of social perception is revealed through direct and everyday communication, then apperception is rather a tool in the hands of professionals who not only study perception and mechanisms, but also manage these processes. Author: Ruslana Kaplanova