Interpersonal Communication, Session 05

PERCEPTION IN
INTERPERSONAL
COMMUNICATION

• Five Stages of
Perception

Interpersonal Communication, Session 05, prepared by Z. Hidayat, MM, M.Si. 1

STAGES OF PERCEPTION

• Interpersonal perception is a
continuous series of processes into one another.
Interpersonal perception separates into five
stages: 1) You sense, you pick up some kind of
stimulation; 2) you organize the stimuli in some
way; 3) you interpret and evaluate what you
perceive; 4) you store it in memory; and 5) you
retrieve it when needed.

Stage One: Stimulation

• At this first stage, your sense organs are

stimulated—hear, see, smell, taste, feel, etc.
• Naturally, we don’t perceive everything;
rather we engage in selective perception, a
general term that includes selective attention
and selective exposure.

Interpersonal Communication, Session 05, prepared by Z. Hidayat, MM, M.Si.

Stage Two: Organization
• At the second stage, we organize the
information our senses pick up. Three interesting
ways in which people organize their perceptions
are by rules, by schemata, and by scripts.

Organization by Rules
• One frequently used rule of perception is that
of proximity or physical closeness: Things that are
physically close together constitute a unit.
• Using this rule, we would perceive people
who are often together, or messages spoken one
immediately after the other, as units, as belonging
together.
• Temporal rule: the signals sent at about the
same time are related and constitute a unified whole.
• Similarity: the people who work at the same
jobs, who are the same religion, who live in the same
cluster.
• Contrast is the opposite of similarity, when items
are very different from each other, and don’t belong
together.
Interpersonal Communication, Session 05, prepared by Z. Hidayat, MM, M.Si.
Organization by Schemata
• Creating schemata, mental templates or
structures that help we organize the millions of items of
information we come into contact with every day as well
as we already have in memory.
• Schemata is the plural of schema. Schemata
may thus viewed as general ideas about qualities,
abilities, and even liabilities; or about social roles (such
as the character of a police officer, professor, or
advocate, etc.

Organization by Scripts
• A script is an organized body of information about
some action, event, or procedure. It’s a general idea of
how some event should play out or unfold, it’s the rules
governing events and their sequence.
• Example: you probably have a script for
eating in a restaurant, with the actions organized
into a pattern something like this: enter, take a
seat, review the menu, order form the menu, eat
the food, ask for the bill, leave a tip, pay the bill,
and exit the restaurant..
Interpersonal Communication, Session 05, prepared by Z. Hidayat, MM, M.Si.
Stage Three: Interpretation-
Evaluation

• The interpretation-evaluation step

is inevitably subjective and is greatly influenced
by our experiences, needs, wants, values, beliefs
about the way things are or should be,
expectation, physical and emotional state, and so
on.
• Out interpretation-evaluation will
be influenced by our rules, schemata, and scripts
as well as by gender.

Stage Four: Memory

• Our perception and interpretation-
evaluation are put into memory; they are stored
so that we may ultimately retrieve them at some
later time.

Interpersonal Communication, Session 05, prepared by Z. Hidayat, MM, M.Si.

Stage Five: Recall
• Recall means at the some late date we may
want to access the information that have stored in
our memory.
• When we want to retrieve this information,
we may recall it with a variety of inaccuracies:

• The information is consistent with your

schema; in fact, you may not even be recalling
the specific information.
• When we fail to recall information that is
inconsistent with your schema; you have no
place to put information, so you easily lose it or
forget it.
• We may recall information that
drastically contradicts our schema, because it
forces we ti think (and perhaps rethink) about
our schema and its accuracy.

Interpersonal Communication, Session 05, prepared by Z. Hidayat, MM, M.Si.