Question

1.) Articulate and describe two separate advantages of being a high self-monitor and two separate advantages of being a low self-monitor.

2.) Using concrete examples, articulate and explain three of the risks of self-disclosure identified in your text

3.) The United States is sometimes criticized for being as individualistic as it is. What are some good things about growing up in an individualist culture? In what ways would growing up in a collectivistic culture be better? Explain and defend your answer.

4.) Using concrete examples, articulate and explain how perceptual accuracy can be influenced by social and occupational roles.

5.) Identify and define each of the four types of language rules articulated in your text.

Answer 1

1. HIGH SELF-MONITOR

A person who is a high self-monitor is much like a chameleon. People who are high self-monitors have natural abilities to read and gauge social and environmental cues and to then quickly adapt their behaviors to fit unnoticed into new situations. They observe and quickly adapt to their behaviors to prevailing social norms, customs, rituals, dress, language, and patterns of interaction. In a relatively short amount of time, high self-monitors can seamlessly blend into new social contexts and become almost unrecognized as outsiders.

If an outcome depends on another person, high self-monitors will recall more information about the other person, and make more confident judgments and extreme inferences about the other person.

LOW-SELF MONITOR

LSMs have a greater consistency between their attitudes and their behavior.

Act themselves regardless of the situation, so they rarely conform to the norms of the social setting; and therefore, bring the chnage.

2. One risk is that the person will not respond favourably to the information. Self-disclosure does not automatically lead to favourable impressions.

Another risk is that the other person will gain power in the relationship because of the information they possess.

Finally, too much self-disclosure or self-disclosure that comes too early in a relationship can damage the relationship.

3. People from individualistic cultures are more likely to have an independent view of themselves (they see themselves as separate from others, define themselves based on their personal traits, and see their characteristics as relatively stable and unchanging).

Americans are particularly challenged in their ability to understand someone else’s point of view because they are part of a culture that encourages individualism, new research in psychology shows.

On the other hand, people from collectivistic cultures are more likely to have an interdependent view of themselves (they see themselves as connected to others, define themselves in terms of relationships with others, and see their characteristics as more likely to change across different contexts).

Psychologists have suggested that East Asians are less likely to talk about a stressful event because doing so can present a challenge to relationships in collectivistic cultures. Instead, individuals from East Asian cultures are more likely to seek out implicit social support, which involves spending time with close others without actually talking about a stressor

4. our accuracy depends on how we selectively attend to one information and ignores other. Selective attention is itself influenced by societal values.

One of the major problems in perception is to ensure that we always perceive the same object in the same way, despite the fact that the sensations that it creates on our receptors changes dramatically. The ability to perceive a stimulus as constant despite changes in sensation is known as perceptual constancy. Consider our image of a door as it swings. When it is closed, we see it as rectangular, but when it is open, we see only its edge and it appears as a line. But we never perceive the door as changing shape as it swings—perceptual mechanisms take care of the problem for us by allowing us to see a constant shape.