ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how communicators decode information about other people and their messages. It begins by showing how receivers use person prototypes, stereotypes, personal constructs, and attributions to judge their partners’ characteristics and motives. It also describes biases that can distort person perception including naïve realism, the confirmation bias, interpersonal self-fulfilling prophesies, the bias blind spot, and the fundamental attribution error. This part of the chapter ends by suggesting that automatic, mindless processing should be balanced by controlled, mindful thinking in order to enhance person perception.
The second part of the chapter focuses on listening, looking at how communicators decode their partners’ spoken and nonverbal messages. It explains the steps in listening and suggests ways to improve listening skills. After looking at how attention can be enhanced, it goes on to consider factors that affect interpretation and offers suggestions on how to evaluate spoken and online messages. A discussion of responding and active listening is followed by an explanation of storage and retrieval, including the topic of false memory. The chapter ends by pointing out that senders can make it easier for receivers to listen by designing messages that facilitate message processing.
