Understanding Personal Contructs

The judgments we make about people are not all without merit. We have spent our whole lives trying to figure out other people and our judgment skills have been honed and well practiced. However, as we blindly assess the people we are in contact with we sometimes forget how much alike or not alike we really are.The Personal Construct Theory explains that we create certain truths about people and things to help explain the reality around us. For this post, I did an exercise in constructs by comparing people I know by simply writing down a few words that come to mind when I think of them. I think the results of this exercise show how things can easily seem so different at first glance and how relationships help to dictate our thoughts.

I first compared my sister, Bridget, with a kid I knew from high school, Dave, who I did not like very much. I must preface this by saying that I have always been friendly with Dave and we were more friends than rivals. But I always knew he would be someone I did not stay in contact with all my life because I just did not like certain things about him. The similarities between the two were their stubbornness and selfishness. Their differences were Bridget I saw as smart, shy, and nice while Dave I saw as vapid, loud and materialistic. Next I compared one of my best friends Peter and one of my best female friends Andria. I wrote that they both were nice and generous. For Peter I wrote loyal, easy going, and goofy. For Andria I wrote caring, engaging, and pretty. Lastly I compared myself with my sister Bridget. Like her, I wrote down smart, shy, and stubborn. However, instead of selfish and nice, I saw myself as calm and calculating.

This exercise made me realize how the type of relationship I have with someone may affect my initial thoughts about them. I do feel, at least in written form, that my values could be unrefined because I kept going to similar adjectives. I think I may have stereotyped a bit based on the relationships I have and gender. For instance, when I started the list for my sister, I went straight for her faults even though I am closest with her than most on the list and think very highly of her. With my two friends, I immediately wrote loyal for my male friend and pretty for my female friend. Loyalty is generally a best friend quality. Pretty, on the other hand, is not something necessary for a friendship. However, since she is a female the first thing to come to my head was how pretty she is.

As far as being fair and complete; I think that is almost impossible. While the assessments I made were fair in my mind, they are far from complete. All of the constructs I used could probably be applied to everyone on my list in some capacity. We are all made up the same traits but some are more prevalent in others. I did judge myself very favorably because I have a favorable view of myself. I included some of my faults because I am very aware of them. I think for people to develop rich and complex constructs they must first realize how much they have in common with the rest of the world. You could be just like your worst enemy and nothing like your best friend even on the surface. They key is to respect people’s strengths and remember your weaknesses when criticizing.

A More Perfect Union

The Constitution of our nation was intended to design a form of government that would nurture in time a “perfect union” free of tyranny and persecution. It is written in plain English that within our democracy that all citizens would be treated equal under law. What is haunting us now over 200 years later is what President Obama described as our country’s “original sin” of not initially heeding those words. While we make strides everyday towards a perfect union, the fact that we had nurtured separatism for so long is the reason we still have racial resentment today.

At the core of resentment and anger on both sides of the racial divide are fear and worry. There are major problems within this country that aren’t strictly race-related yet it always seems to be at the end of the discussion. The black community harbors the resentment of being second-class citizens pretty much under law up until some fifty years ago with the ramifications still being felt in their communities today. The white community feels persecuted for sins they personally haven’t committed while they watch their jobs get outsourced and the separation between rich and poor grow rapidly. Everyone would appear to be in the same boat when it comes to fearing for the security of their livelihood and for the country as a whole and that is why it is counterproductive to turn our anger towards something as simple as race.

We are all in this together. In order for the dream of a perfect union to be realized we must become a trans-racial society that doesn’t see race as the problem. As I implied earlier, Jim Crow laws and segregation were only a half a century ago. That means generations alive today witnessed and lived through something so blatantly Unconstitutional. Part of bringing about a perfect union is the time and generations it takes to heal such wounds. We need to come to a point where instead of fighting against each other we fight with each other as Americans regardless of race, color, or creed.

Intercultural Communication via Virtual Worlds

It is a small world and after all the years of discovery and settling we are left with people who are defined and act in ways according to where they were raised. People are different and alike within and across cultures. People are people. But the same human emotions we all share also create some of the most powerful barriers to communication between cultures. Mainly fear and anxiety hinder our ability to feel comfortable around people from other cultures. Through internet globalization and the concept of virtual worlds the world is getting smaller because we have access to each other with a simple mouse click. These new channels create new relationships and learning possibilities between people of different cultures that could vastly improve the way we think about others.

Intercultural communication is basically communication between different cultures. It seems like an easy concept to grasp but recognizing the level to which it affects the way we think about others is much harder. On the surface, simple language barriers restrict our contact with other cultures but what about other cultures that do speak the same language? On the surface people fear Arab looking people because they may be a terrorist but what about the people that fear African-Americans because they may be a “thug” or a criminal? The cultural divide is not restricted to people from other countries or skin color. Cultures are different whether you fly half way across the globe or half way across the country. The fact is you are comfortable with people from your own culture because you know what they are like. And you know what they are like because you have spent a lot of time around them. And spending time around a culture eliminates the fear of unknown that restricts us all.

Virtual worlds are places on the internet where people get together and socialize. They can take many different forms. It could be just a casual setting, a game setting, or even a classroom setting. The actual world may be simulated but the interactions are real.
Being in a virtual world can loosen major barriers for intercultural communication that would be harder to do in the real world. First of all you are (ideally) in the comfort of your own home in a safe environment. You also may have a greater feeling of anonymity because you are interacting with people outside of your everyday life. Both of those factors contribute to relieving anxiety. According to Jandt (2010), in the presence of strangers (or people of different cultures) our anxiety level is high which ultimately leads us to avoid interactions. It is the same anxiety we face our first day at a new job or at a new school but at least if we are around people we can relate to we are more likely to attempt interaction. Interacting with a stranger has a high probability of being awkward. In a virtual world you can worry less about awkwardness or embarrassing yourself because most people will be strangers to each other.

Interaction in the virtual world as it is now is still limited compared to the real thing. The major difference is reading people’s nonverbal behaviors. Simple behaviors such as facial expressions can say more than actual words during an interaction. Smiles, frowns, or fright (just to name a few) are a universal language of humans and even animals. Another nonverbal behavior restricted in the virtual world is proxemics. Different cultures have different “personal space bubbles” meaning how close we get when communicating with each other (Jandt, 2010). Standing too close or even too far could mean different things to different cultures.

Basically our interactions with people are vastly different based on our comfort level. We are restricted by fear of being embarrassed, clueless, or misunderstood. Intercultural communication raises the level of fear and anxiety because we are interacting with strangers with customs we are unsure of. Virtual worlds help to close the gap by allowing us to interact with different cultures from our home. They say familiarity breeds contempt but being unfamiliar breeds fear and results in less interaction. What virtual worlds do is allow new access to different cultures and the possibility of familiarity.

References
Jandt, F.E. (2010). An introduction to intercultural communication: Identities in a global community (6th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage