Andy Ingraham 2/3/2011 Dr. Kennedy SOC 3133 Are Our Social Perceptions Often Inaccurate? Yes.

Every day we are required to make judgments about the people and situations around us. We make these judgments based on the input we receive from our environment such as visual, auditory, or olfactory. While each has its own flaws and they are all fallible at times, they generally do a decent job of getting the raw data to the mind there are a couple of other problems that prevent us from perceiving correctly. The first problem is the data. The data that our sensory systems are gathering is oftentimes very noisy, but our mind does a decent job filtering out the noise, you havent seen the tip of your nose lately, have you? The true problem with the data is the originators of the data. Each one of us broadcasts a projection or image that we wish to be known as. With some individuals that image is situational. As you can imagine is can become difficult to gauge whether a person is projecting a true image of themselves, and for this reason we treat images agnostically. We have a profile of situations and people that we recount in order to make assumptions for how to behave in the future. Evolutionarily this was great. If you saw a lion, it was probably time to be leaving, every time. But the problem is that we are capable of projecting many different images in order to be perceived many different ways. And we dont always act as our projection would indicate. Past actions are not a good indicator of future behavior. This is the primary fallacy of our minds when dealing with social perception error. Our minds act as if all projections are true and treat them as such. It is not until the mind finds a flaw in the projection that it begins to doubt the images integrity and reform a new one.