Territoriality and personal space

.Another aspect of proxemics is our need for a denned territory. Some animals mark their territory by urinating around its perimeter and will defend their Area against invaders. Human beings also stake out space, or territory, and ter-ntoriality is an important variable in interpersonal communication. What examples of territoriality can you remember encountering? Are you familiar with "Dad's chair"? "Mom's bureau"? How do you feel when someone invades your room—"your territory"? Is it comfortable to look into your rearview mirror and see that you are being tailgated by a tractor-trailer? What happens when someone stands too close to you? How are you treated when vou enter another person's territory? For example, did your sister ever throw you out of her room? Did she ever ask you to keep your hands off her stereo?

To establish territory, we employ markers. At the library, for instance, you may spread your things out, over, and across the table so that others will not rind it easy to enter your territory. In large corporations a person's status is often reflected by the size of his or her space. Thus, the president may be accorded a large top-floor territory, while a clerk is given a desk in a second-floor room amid a number of other desks and office machines. Regardless of its size, how­ever, we identify with our location and frequently act as if we owned it.

Lecture 3. Communication and Perception.

Outline.

1. Perception.

2. Culture and perception.

3. Gender and perception.

Perception is the process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting sensory data in a way that enables us to make sense of our world. Perceptions are personally based. They are affected by the perspective we adopt, our sensory capa­bilities, our past experiences, and our level of motivation. The accuracy of our perceptions is strongly influenced by perceptual sets (readiness to process stim­uli in predetermined ways), selective exposure (a tendency to close ourselves to new experiences), and selective perception (an inclination to distort our per­ceptions of stimuli to make them conform to our need for internal consistency or closure).

How we perceive another person is a key determinant of the kind of rela­tionship we will share with that person. Thus, perceiving others and the roles they play is an essential part of the communication process. In this regard, a number of factors can prevent accurate perceptions. We frequently evaluate others on the basis of first impressions, and we tend to stereotype people—to divide them into groups and place them in niches. Stereotyping can be espe­cially harmful by promoting prejudice, since it encourages us to emphasize similarities and ignore differences. Prejudice is an unfair or biased extension of stereotyping, which we must guard against. Other barriers to perceptual accu­racy are allness (the habit of thinking we know it all), blindering (the tendency to obscure solutions to problems by adding unnecessary restrictions), and con­fusion of facts with inferences (inability to distinguish between observations and assumptions).