In class on September 30, we talked about the multiple aspects that people in relationships have when it comes to conversing.  Different aspects ranging from the overall gender roles and how males and females communicate/interact with their friends, all the way to the process of human perception and the common errors that go along with these perceptions.  We also touched on effective skills for expressing your own emotions and tips for effective communication.

The first thing that we touched on was the difference in how people communicate and interact with each other based off of gender.  We addressed how males tend to be more active when they hang with other males in that they tend to go to the bars, play sports, or even just play videogames.  On the other hand females tend to hang and talk either at a house or over coffee. However it was stressed that there is no behavior that is only true for men and women. This means that just because the overall majority of males are more active when with their male friends, this does not mean that they wouldn't hang just to talk, or that while the majority of females hang and talk with their friends this does not mean that they aren't active as well.

We also talked about the human perception and how it is human nature to come to assumptions.  A very fun activity we did to demonstrate this was by trying to guess certain things about Dr. Jackson. These questions ranged from what type of car she drives, to what she likes to do while watching TV, and the instruments she plays.  The class didn’t know any of the answers to these questions 100% of course, and the assignment was to guess what the correct answer was based off of what we had seen from her as a professor. This example was very fun and easily showed just how off the human perception and the assumptions that come with it can really be. For example it seemed that the entire class had assumed Dr. Jackson was a mother –in fact one student addressed that—and when asked what type of car we believed she drove the vast majority of answers were sedans.

I had never noticed just how many assumptions I have made about people, unknowingly, and how these assumptions had become so engrained in my mind they almost seem to be facts. In truth I was one of the students that thought Dr. Jackson had kids, even though there was no real facts to back that assumption.  I knew that she was married by her ring and knew she was very passionate about teaching by how she approaches each class. These variables enabled my mind to be suckered into the popular society view/norm that married teachers typically have children of their own. I must admit that learning about the human perception has put a spotlight on how often we come to assumptions, and that I will start to make a conscious effort to stay away from assuming, for we all know about what assumptions make out of those who assume.