Respong To Betizen's Comments

Netzen's Comment: I tend to think that the organizers of either pageant org and particularly Nawat himself don't see it that way.  Does public outcry or anyone else in the fora have the clout or the influence to make Nawat rescind what has been decided and defeat his true intention?  No one can stop anyone from saying this and that but after all, that has been said and done what comes to print is all a matter of personal opinion.  I like to think that here the stated prejudice outside these pages hardly matters to Angkol or his stooges.  I'm no avowed fan of the man's egocentric persona but I got entertained by MGI's antics, to say the least.

Response: Nawat's antics almost annoyed 90 percent of netizens while about 10 percent took it for its entertainment value. Of course, there is nothing wrong with both reactions.

What is being shown here is Edward L. Thorndike's stimulus-response theory.  One stimulus - different perceptions. Nawat is the stimulus and the same set of perceivers have different interpretations of him.

So far, we have assumed that different perceivers will all form pretty much the same impression of the same person. For instance, if two people are both thinking about Nawat, or describing him to someone else, they should each think about or describe him in pretty much the same way. After all, Nawat is Nawat, and he should have a personality that they can both see. But this is not always the case; they may form different impressions of Nawat for a variety of reasons. 

For one, the two people’s experiences with Nawat may be somewhat different. If one sees him in different places and talks to him about different things than the other, then they will each have a different sample of behavior on which to base their impressions.

To every experience, each of us brings our own schemas, attitudes, and expectations. In fact, the process of interpretation guarantees that we will not all form exactly the same impression of the people that we see. This, of course, reflects a basic principle—our prior experiences color our current perceptions.

One factor that influences how we perceive others is the current cognitive accessibility of a given person's characteristics. Some people first notice how attractive someone is because they care a lot about physical appearance—for them, appearance is a highly accessible characteristic. If you are interested in style and fashion, you would probably first notice a person’s clothes, whereas another person might be more likely to notice a person’s athletic skills. These differences in accessibility will influence the kinds of impressions that we form about others because they influence what we focus on and how we think about them.

Another factor is how people differ in terms of how carefully they process information about others. People with a strong need for cognition tend to process information more thoughtfully and therefore may make more causal attributions overall. In contrast, people without a strong need for cognition tend to be more impulsive and impatient and may make attributions more quickly and spontaneously. People higher in need of cognition may take more situational factors into account when considering the behaviors of others. Consequently, they tend to make more tolerant rather than focus on punitive attributions about people - in this case, Nawat.