Perceiving People

Like Mrs. Perl, my favorite approach on personality is definitely the social cognitive perspective. This perspective takes into account the complexities of life. I really like how it includes nature and nurture and doesn't just focus on one or the other. As we said in class today, we have learned about the bio-psycho-social approach in many of our chapters and it is just a great way of explaining all of the factors that can contribute to a final action/behavior. One thing that really scared me today was when Mrs. Perl was giving the example of someone who thinks of her as shy and someone who thinks of her as stand-offish. People perceive things in different ways and the way something/someone is perceived determines the future course of events. For example, Aviva sees Mrs. Perl as shy and nervous so when she meets her, Aviva is very friendly and sweet to make Mrs. Perl feel comfortable. However, Zahava perceives Mrs. Perl as stand offish and is therefore rude to her and thinks she is so mean. This is all so scary because how you think of someone else is how they will react to you. This happens a lot in school. For example, sometimes teachers think that one of their students is so sweet and caring while the students hate her because she is so mean. The teacher and the students both perceived this person differently and so that person will react or behave differently to those people. From all of this I have learned that you cannot just make generalizations about people in one moment. I really do think that all of the people in the school are good-hearted girls, but sometimes I might perceive them wrongfully. Anything can be going on in their lives: biologically, psychologically, or socially. Maybe they have a bad cold, or maybe they're really tired, or maybe they failed their test. You really never know what is going on with every person and it's important to sometimes look past mean comments or random outbursts because we do not want to make the mistake of perceiving them in the wrong way.