Comm Cards

Front 1

perception

Back 1

the mental process through which we come to understand the world around us

Front 2

selective attention

Back 2

describes the reason why we choose certain stimuli over others

Front 3

selective exposure

Back 3

refers to the tendency for people to expose themselves to those things that support their current belief systems and avoid stimuli that challenge or contradict them

Front 4

schemata

Back 4

mental blueprints that help indicuduals sturcture their thought processes and organize and interpret the things around them

Front 5

scripts

Back 5

a type of schema that guide behavior

Front 6

prototypes

Back 6

represent the ideal form of something

Front 7

stereotypes

Back 7

generaliztions that we assume are true for all things belonging to a certain general category

Front 8

closure

Back 8

we fill in the gaps with stimuli in order to make sense of them

Front 9

standpoint theory

Back 9

a body of theories grounded in the field of sociology and recently adopted by a growing number of communication scholars

Front 10

perceptual constancy

Back 10

refers to the tendency that percepions remain consistent over time

Front 11

ethnocentrism

Back 11

the belief that your cultural group is superior to all other groups

Front 12

perceptual accentuation

Back 12

the tendency to see what you expect or want to see

Front 13

self-fulfilling prophecy

Back 13

happens when people make a prediction that ulitimately becomes true, in part, because they behaveas if it is true

Front 14

selective distortion

Back 14

a process whereby we alter our perceptions of stimuli so that our existing ideas remain intact

Front 15

self-attribution bias

Back 15

the bad things are caused by some external factor that was out of our control