Psychology Quiz: Perception and Attention

Perception

• Perception is the process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting information from the environment.
• Alicia Akers, a marketing executive, always talks in a high pitch and draws attention wherever she is, which shows that characteristics of the target affect people's perception.

Attribution

• Attribution is the process of assigning causes to events or behaviors.
• Janice Yoder, who works in an environmental campaigning organization, always finds it difficult to work as a part of a team and has major disagreements with team members, which lead to antagonistic relations between them. According to the attribution theory, this behavior can be attributed to internal factors.

Motivation

• Motivation is defined as the processes that account for an individual's intensity, direction, and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal.
• According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, social-belongingness is a lower level need.
• Herzberg's two-factor theory states that recognition is a motivational factor.
• McClelland's theory of needs proposes that people with a high achievement need prefer tasks that have a moderate level of risk.

Group Dynamics

• Cohesiveness refers to the degree to which members are attracted to each other and motivated to stay in the group.
• When compared to individual decision making, group decision making has a disadvantage in the area of speed.
• Groupthink can be minimized by encouraging group members to engage in a critical evaluation of ideas at the beginning.
• Groupshift is a phenomenon where group members tend to exaggerate the initial positions they hold.

Conflict Management

• According to the traditional view of conflict, all conflict is harmful and must be avoided.
• Relationship conflicts are almost always dysfunctional.
• A party who seeks to appease an opponent may be willing to place the opponent's interests above his or her own, sacrificing to maintain the relationship, which is known as accommodating.
• Conflict is dysfunctional when it reduces group cohesiveness.

Teams and Team Building

• The primary purpose of a workgroup is to improve collective performance.
• A work team is characterized by the presence of complementary skills among members and individual accountability for outcomes and results.
• A team consists of employees from the same department who meet for a few hours each week to discuss ways of improving the work environment, but they do not have the authority to unilaterally implement any of their suggestions, which is most likely to be a problem-solving team.
• Self-managed work teams are typically composed of employees from different departments who work independent of each other.

Leadership

• The LMX (leader member exchange) theory proposes that a leader implicitly categorizes followers as "in" or "out" early in the interaction.
• Charismatic leadership theory proposes that followers attribute heroic or extraordinary leadership abilities when they observe certain behaviors.
• A transactional leader is likely to reward employees for the work that they have done, thus recognizing accomplishments.
• Transformational leaders inspire followers to transcend their self-interests for the good of the organization and can have an extraordinary effect on their followers.
• Laissez-faire leadership is the least effective leadership behavior.