The document discusses how people create their own realities through perception and how differing realities can lead to disagreements. The perception process involves selecting and prioritizing environmental data based on our experiences, and then interpreting it. Our realities are influenced by psychological, physical, linguistic, educational, and experiential factors. Reality testing and empathic listening can help reduce distortions between individuals' realities.

1. Discovering our realities
How we use the perception process to
create realities about people, events, and
things in our environment.

2. What is commonly called “reality” is created in the mind.
Reality is not what is “real,” it’s what we think is real.
What is reality?

3. All disagreements between human beings occur as a result of differing
realities generated from the same environment.
The perception process – the method we
use to create our reality from our environment.

4. 1. Select data from the environment
We use five senses (sight, smell, hearing, feeling, taste).
2. Organize and prioritize the information
Organization is based on our experiences. They are
unique.
3. Interpreting the data
We search our memory and assign meaning to the data
based on its similarity to our previous experiences.
3 steps in the perception process:

5. Psychological condition affects HOW we recognize
incoming data(if we are in love even a rainy day might
look good to us)
Selecting and sorting filters

6. Physical condition can affect WHAT data we
recognize(include sense, age, health, hunger)
Language allows us to understand messages from the
environment
Selecting and sorting filters

7. Formal learning shapes how we view our
environment
Experiences are our first hand learning activities
Expectations are perceptions that we expect to
conform to what we already believe the actual event
is. Influenced by: culture, social roles, gender roles.
Selecting and sorting filters

8. Closure is the mind’s imperative to make sense
out of its environment, even when only a
limited amount of data is available.
Selective perception takes place when we use
only some of the cognitions to interpret the
environment.
Pattering is the attempt to keep new
perception in line with past ones.
Factors that influence how we
interpret data

9.  Our perception does not necessarily represent the one and
only reality of the topic under discussion.
Reality testing

10.  One goal of the argumentative process is to narrow
the differences in perceptions between individuals.
 Sharing and comparing our realities with those of
others can help reduce distortions and differences
among the many realities you have created.
Reality testing

11.  Empathic listening – employs empathy as the basis for
understanding the positions of others.
 Total empathy is impossible to achieve.
 The objective of empathic listening is understanding.
 Deliberative listening – an attempt to make definite, deliberate
attempt to hear information, analyze it, draw conclusion from
it, and recall it at a later time.
 This type is appropriate when the goal of listening is to gather information.
Better listening skills

12.  Is the absence of change in one or more of our
realities for some extended period of time.
 While experiencing stasis, we feel physically and
emotionally content.
 Stasis can be referred to as a person’s personal
comfort zone.
Stasis=“at rest”

13.  Communicating Critical Thinking by Jack Sterk and Jim
Marteney
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