1. Social Perception and
Communication
Dr. Bradford

2. Vocabulary
• Social Perception: the study of how we form
impressions of and make inferences about
other people (p. 76)
• Nonverbal communication: the way in which
people communicate, intentionally or
unintentionally, without words; nonverbal
cues include facial expressions, tone of voice,
gestures, body position, gaze, etc.

3. Non-Referential and Referential
Communication
Communication
REFERENTIAL
NON-REFERENTIAL
(with Signs)
(without Signs)
= interacting with +
= interacting with
communicating about

4. (How) Do Humans Communicate
Differently from Animals?
• CULTURE, ‘SYMBOLIC INTERACTION’, or HUMAN
LANGUAGE =
– learned and symbolic communicative
behavior.
Symbolic
Learned
Behavior Communica-
tion

5. Two ‘channels’ of
Human Communication
All communication has two levels or
dimensions: content and relationship
Content Relationship
Symbolic Body Language
Information Behavior (meta-information)
WHAT is communicated HOW something is
communicated
• All communication is both communication and
communication about communication.

6. Two ‘channels’ of
Human Communication
• Human communication has two ‘channels’
operating at the same time: content and
relationship.
• Words are spoken by someone to someone
about someone (or something).

7. Two ‘channels’ of
Human Communication
• Communication is any behavior perceived as
expressing some message:
1. What (information) is communicated, and
2. How (behavior) this info is expressed.
Communication
Messages Expressions
Selected Selected Other perceptions
Message Expression

8. Body Language and Play
Negation and “NOT”
 There is no simple way of
expressing negation or the word
“not” in body language!
 Gregory Bateson (1972)
proposed that playful behavior
arose as a way of
communicating the concept of
“not.”

9. Responses to Communication at
Relationship Level
• In interpersonal encounters, each person offers a definition of
themselves and the other as part of an overall definition of
the situation. We can distinguish 3 different ways that
someone may respond to the definition of self (and other)
offered by the other:
1. Confirmation/Acceptance
2. Rejection
3. Disconfirmation

10. Responses to Communication at
Relationship Level
1) Confirmation/Acceptance
 Acceptance of the relationship implied in a
communication.
 Most communications are for validating our
selves and our relationships
Example: accepting friend
requests on facebook.

11. Responses to Communication at
Relationship Level
2) Rejection
 A rejection of the relationship someone is implicitly
attempting to create;
 Importantly, rejection presupposes recognition of what is
being rejected.

12. Responses to Communication at
Relationship Level
3) Disconfirmation
 Occurs when someone does not recognize that
they don't recognize you (or the type of person
or relation you are attempting to invoke).
 Disconfirmation leads to a loss of self,
depersonalization, and even dehumanization.

13. Responses to Communication at
Relationship Level
3) Disconfirmation
• It is thus far more dramatic than outright rejection. Whereas
a mis-match in perception occurs in both, with
disconfirmation, there is no recognition by at least one party
that the mismatch is happening!
• Watzlawick et al. (1967) write: “ [W]hile rejection amounts to
the message 'You are Wrong', disconfirmation says in effect
'You do not exist'" (86).
• Bateson proposed that disconfirmation which was repeatedly
experienced could lead to schizophrenia.

14. Responses to Communication at
Relationship Level
3) Disconfirmation
– Example from Reading “Being Sane in Insane Places”
From film “One Flew Over
The Cookoo’s Nest”
Pseudo-patients act sane. In response, the nurses can either a) acknowledge and accept that
they are acting sane; b) recognize that they are acting sane, but not believe it (i.e. reject their
performance); or c) not even recognize that they are acting sane! The last response (i.e.
disconfirmation) is what occurred in the study.

15. What are Signs?
• SIGNS (*as defined in this lecture*) are a type of
stimulus producing a response to something other
than itself.
• SIGNS REFER TO SOMETHING. Signs include symbols.
– Signs can be natural or artificial: smoke is a sign of fire, as
is the word “fire”

16. Causes, Signs, and Symbols
1. CAUSES: physical Domino effect
cause and effect; Uni-
directional and
Deterministic
2. SIGNS: indirectly
triggers a response to
something other than ‘stimulus’ ‘response’
the stimulus; SIGN
INDICATES
SOMETHING ELSE to Rain cloud Responds NOT to the cloud
which you respond. directly, but to what it
indicates: rain. You get an
umbrella.

17. Causes, Signs, and Symbols
3. SYMBOLS =
– anything that re-presents something else to
more than one person.
– a sign of a sign! (Human Language)
– {Notice that some perception or idea can be
conveyed to someone else who hasn’t seen it.}
Rain cloud A says B gets an
“It’s about umbrella
to rain!”

18. SYMBOLS
Symbols can do two things:
1. Symbols allow us to refer to or
talk about things that are not
there. Words stand in for
absent things, i.e. serve as
substitutes for them. This is
called context independence
(aka ‘Displacement’).
“These Letters
• ‘X counts as Y’ are symbols”

19. SYMBOLS
Symbols can do two things:
2. Symbols can also create the
very things to which they
refer!
• ‘X counts as Y’, where ‘Y’ is
some relationship!

20. Symbols and Institutions
Symbolic Language is necessary to
create institutions.
‘X counts as Y’
• Examples:
– Money. We can agree that paper
counts as money. But money (Y)
has no existence apart from our
definition of it.
– Rules of chess: the rules of chess
create chess. Chess would not exist
apart from these rules. (vs. rules of
traffic, for example) Rules of chess

21. Types of
Interactive Behavior
Interactive Behavior
(‘Communication’) ‘Natural‘ Signs
Non-interactive Anticipation
(smoke = sign of fire)
Non-Referential Referential using
without SIGNS ‘Artificial’ SIGNS
{aka Non-Referential {aka Referential Communication
Communication; Non-anticipatory Anticipatory Communication,
interaction; Conversation of Language, or Digital
Gestures; Body Language, or Communication}
Analogical Communication}
2. *Symbols*
1. Signals (Human Language)