are of little concern. In Style D, the open area is dominant. Relationships involve candor, openness, and sensitivity to the needs and insights of others.
Communication of any depth or significance is difficult if those involved have little open area in common. In any relationship you hope to sustain, your goal should be to increase the size of the open area while decreasing the size of the hidden, blind, and unknown areas. As human beings, we think about others and what they think about us. The question is whether we are able and willing to share what we are thinking.
Figure 3.6
Skill Builder
Symbolizing the Self
This exercise requires the selection of four objects. The first object you choose should reveal something about the way you see yourself, something you believe everyone recognizes about you. In other words, this object should represent an aspect of your open area. The second object you select should reveal something about you that up until now has resided in your hidden area. It could represent an attitude, feeling, desire, or fear that you were keeping from others but are now ready to move into the open area. Your third object choice should represent how you believe another person sees you. The last object is one you need to ask that other person to choose. This object should represent the person’s actual perception of you.
Assess the extent to which your perceptions of yourself and the other person’s perceptions either conflicted or coincided. How has each phase of this experience altered the appearance of your Johari window? Was any information moved from your blind area into the open area?
Manage Impressions
It is normal to want to present ourselves in ways that cause others to perceive us positively. This reality, however, leads us to ask some questions: When we say something publicly, should we always feel it privately? Should we ever present a different self to others than the ones we know to be authentic?
Identify Your Multiple Identities
We do not possess a single identity. Rather we have multiple ones. In the course of a normal day, we perform different roles. In school, we are a student. At home, we may be a child, a sibling, or a parent. On a date, we are a romantic partner. We act differently with different people and when in different settings. We may even act differently with the same person—switching how we behave when we feel it necessary.
Competent communicators naturally display role versatility. They also possess the know-how to construct multiple identities that match the culture of the person they are communicating with and the context. To do this, they engage in frame switching, adopting different perspectives based on the culture and specific situations in which they find themselves. By making conscious choices about how to construct their identity, choosing to act appropriately and not offend others, they create a positive impression.41
Life Is Like a Performance
When we create a positive image of ourselves to influence positively what others think of us and how they feel about us, we are practicing impression management.
According to sociologist Erving Goffman, all of life is a performance. In effect, we act out a role in every interaction, based on the shared relationship. While the perceived self is the self we believe ourselves to really be, Goffman asserts that we use facework to present a public image to others. That self, our presenting self, is a favorable self-image. Often, we adjust the presenting self to accommodate different people. Sometimes this choice is conscious and our communication is designed to accomplish a specific purpose. Other times, this choice is unconscious. What matters most is that the side we show is an authentic reflection of our self-concept. If it is not, then Goffman suggests our front-stage, or public, behavior may contrast with our back-stage, or private, behavior.42 Do your experiences support this?43
Human beings are unique in their ability to observe their behavior. High self-monitors are people who are highly attuned to their impression management efforts. Low self-monitors pay little attention to how others respond to their messages. Some contend that it is unethical to attempt to artificially control a communication by trying to present to others a version of you that is idealized; they believe it is disingenuous to treat relating to others like a performance. What do you think?
iStock/m-gucci
Career Builder: Work Places and Faces
1 Give an example of when you have used facework to make a good impression during a job interview.
2 Google yourself. Based on what you find, how do you imagine that a potential employer would perceive you? Did you come across anything online that you would rather a potential employer not know or see?
3 Interpret the following statement with a supervisor in mind: I may not be what I think I am. I may not be what you think I am. I may well be what I think you think I am. What does it suggest about the relationship between employer and employee?
4 Analyze the different impressions that specific coworkers and your boss might have of you. Which person’s view would you evaluate to be most positive, the most negative, and the most accurate? Explain your reasons and what you can do to combat the negative and inaccurate perceptions.
Barriers to Perceiving Yourself and Others Clearly
Many variables affect perception, a number of which function as barriers, preventing us from perceiving ourselves, others, and situations accurately.
Past Experiences Follow Us
Past experiences can create expectations that produce in us a readiness to process experience in predetermined ways. If, for example, we had a bad experience working on a group project with another student, we likely would become upset if asked to work on a subsequent project with that same student. These perceptual sets affect our interpretation of ourselves, others, and experience.
To better understand how a perceptual set affects us, quickly read the statements written in the triangles in Figure 3.7. Then examine the individual words more carefully. During your first reading, did you miss anything that you now perceive? Many of us fail to see the second the or a in the statements in their first reading. Did you? Why? We are so accustomed to seeing words in familiar groups, or clusters, that often we simply fail to perceive extra words when we see them in such phrases.
Figure 3.7
Motivations such as hunger and poverty also can alter interpretations of experience. In one study, researchers showed sailors some ambiguous pictures and asked them to describe what they saw. Hungry sailors “saw with the stomach”—to them, an elongated smudge looked
