Perception and Personality …

Perception. (check earlier post of personality)

OK, while trying to hit my nail on personality, I came across interesting and articulate remarks from two folks. One I just made a friendship with and the other possibly a decade long friend [the old Harper]. So they both have their say on my small article on personality and one thing that they throw at me is how perception can influence one’s personality. With the example of how a shy person comes forth as an arrogant person and how this is quite commonly held together as reflection of the same inward nature but is quite differently perceived.

So here I will take another shot at pondering over my notions of “perception”.

What is perception?

Perception is again like the matter of personality a subjective one. Your perception of the hardness of an object is different from John’s and John’s perception of a good player is different from the perception of his father’s.

John’s father argues that one who makes quite a lot of tricky movement so as to get the desired result on the ball game is a good player while John swears by the inherent way in which Mr Xenon lofts or swings the ball.

These two folks represent the goodness of the player in different languages but it’s the same thing [trick or natural foot play?] They have different perception of the same physical way the ball is played by the player.

Now coming to hardness while this is not very commonly defined parameter of a large number of objects an obvious argument ensues between John and you.

John finds the hardness of the ball a bit more harsh on his foot and takes a little caution by removing some air. You on the other hand find it perfectly fine. So this is our perception of something which is quite concrete by its own nature, the hardness of an object.

The “goodness” of the player is again a matter of experience and taste and very importantly visual imagination. Its an optical perception if you can in some way equate the other parameters of John and his father.

So perceptions about an object or an optical scene connected with human experience are just two examples where we can form “commonly” held perception, with unequal perception outcomes. There are a myriad different types of “variable” therefore that can be attributed to a notion of perception that can be formed in a human mind.

variable: e.g. hardness, goodness of a player, personality, characteristics.

How then one defines such a notion for something as abstract as personality?

Personality can not defined as hardness can be defined but its somehow connected with another variable, the “goodness” of a player because it is about inner nature of a person or an animal and is abstract in nature.

Personality of a person is quite a significant variable therefore that forms a perception in the mind of the observer much differently than another observer’s.

If we therefore talk about perception it offers quite a multitude of perception parameters for understanding the personality of one person [sample person as opposed to an observer person]

The nature of truth is such, in the terminology of scientific understanding, that the nature or personality of a person has to be an invariant, that is, irrespective of the observer’s state or inclination or quality of forming a perception itself. This could just be a conceptual personality definition.

Once we understand both, the definition of personality  or more aptly inward nature and the “process of perception” of what we see or envisage there is a readily available conclusion about someone’s personality. I think we can direct our understanding in this way for some interesting look/light on the subject of personality.

To respond to some remarks:

Now on to the image of self, image of projection and image we hold of some one else’s self. Lets try to look at these three parameters from the point of view of the above discussion.

Eureka !! Now it sounds like the first and the last one [image of self and image someone forms of some one else’s self] are what I call the view of the observer even if the personality of the same person is in question. We have two observers here for the same variable, therefore two images. The second one [image of projection] is a perception of a multitude of observers since its open to anyone for observation, that is its about general understanding.

Addendum: summary of some main points of the analysis, from Sanjay, quite brilliant understanding.

Perception is the interpretation of observer through their own experience and knowledge that may not project same personality for each observer (non-unique).

Personality is the reaction to perception of other. How we choose to react to different observation of others or occurrence in general defines our personality. This reaction also defines our projection (Nico’s second point).