Our perceptual set is how we see our environment, based on what we expect to see within it. As you would expect, since this is a very subjective way of seeing the world, there are several influences on a person’s perceptual set, four of which appear to be most common:
- Motivation: this refers to how someone can perceive something based on achieving a particular goal. Goals can be both physical and psychological. For example, if someone is hungry and sees a round object with a hole in the middle on a table in the distance, they are more likely to perceive it as a doughnut than someone who is not hungry!
- Expectation: personal experiences shape everyone’s lives. We learn from what we experience and it is thought that this can help us to perceive what is in our environment. Interpretations based on expectation are founded in the person’s personality, traits, attitudes and values, which is why two people may perceive the exact same thing differently – expectation makes perception unique to each individual
- Emotion: how someone is feeling is thought to influence how they perceive things and this may be an indication of their current mood or an aspect of their personality. For example, if two people see a gathering of people in the street several hundred yards ahead, someone who is in a happy emotional state will likely see this is some form of party. Someone who is worried or anxious may instantly perceive it as some form of disturbance
- Culture: some parts of a person’s environment are very specific to a particular culture. For example, if someone from England looked into a person’s window and could just about make out someone pouring brown liquid from an object with a handle and a spout, they would know that this was tea being poured as they are used to seeing this image and can therefore perceive it quickly. Someone from a remote African tribe witnessing the same image would likely have no idea what they were looking at and so their perception would be based on their own culture in determining how they interpreted the image.
Each of these factors is thought to enable someone to quickly anticipate what is happening around them and therefore be able to anticipate something more effectively. However, any of these factors can also mean that someone misinterprets something because they are basing what they are seeing on what they expect to see, rather than what is actually there in front of them.
