Personal Reflection Paper - Essay Example

The main characters in the experience I explain are my best friend Jeff, his girlfriend Kelsey and me. There were many different stages in this experience too. As Jeff and I were friends since long, Kelsey too became a close friend of mine through him. However, one day I saw Jeff terribly upset and when I asked him as to what happened, he told me that he and Kelsey are no more having a good time together. Soon, it reached a breakup. Jeff was totally shattered, and he said that Kelsey was a terrible person for the way she dealt with the break up.

By the time he finished explaining all the ill deeds of Kelsey, my perceptions about Kelsey was totally altered. I got a totally different perception of Kelsey and I could no more see her as a friend because in my opinion, she totally lacked sympathy and empathy. However, the unexpected happened later on. A month or two later, I found Jeff and Kelsey talking over phone and in one weeks time, I found them together again. However, I found it entirely difficult to forget the wrong doing and forgive her.

I told Jeff that I had nothing to do with her. However, later on, Kelsey came to me and forced me to listen to her explanation. As I heeded to her request, what I got was a totally different picture. The information Jeff gave me was over exaggerated and partially wrong. Thus, after months, I found that the conclusion I reached about Kelsey was wrong and I had to change it. Evidently, this is a perfect example of wrong perception where a number of factors ranging from a wrong application of perception schema and the limitation imposed by perceptual set created problems in my understanding.

In addition, one can see the influence of recency effect. It seems that I went wrong from the moment of selecting the stimuli. I gave attention to the wrong stimulus and ended up in a wrong perception. There are various factors that affect the process of