Perception PDF

Perception  Perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.  However, what we perceive can be substantially different from objective reality.  Why is perception important in the study...

Perception  Perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.  However, what we perceive can be substantially different from objective reality.  Why is perception important in the study of OB?  Simply because people’s behavior is based on their perception of what reality is, not on reality itself. Person Perception Attribution Theory Attribution theory tries to explain the ways in which we judge people differently, depending on the meaning we attribute to a given behavior. It suggests that when we observe an individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused. That determination, however, depends largely on three factors: (1) distinctiveness, (2) consensus, and (3) consistency.  Internally caused behaviors are those we believe to be under the personal control of the individual. Externally caused behavior is what we imagine the situation forced the individual to do.  Now let’s discuss the three determining factors.  Distinctiveness refers to whether an individual displays different behaviors in different situations.  If everyone who faces a similar situation responds in the same way, we can say the behavior shows consensus.  An observer looks for consistency in a person’s actions. Distinctiveness refers to whether an individual displays different behaviors in different situations. Is the employee who arrives late today also one who regularly doesn’t meet commitments? What we want to know is whether this behavior is unusual. If it is, we are likely to give it an external attribution. If it’s not, we will probably judge the behavior to be internal. If everyone who faces a similar situation responds in the same way, we can say the behavior shows consensus. The behavior of our tardy employee meets this criterion if all employees who took the same route were also late. From an attribution perspective, if consensus is high, you would probably give an external attribution to the employee’s tardiness, whereas if other employees who took the same route made it to work on time, you would attribute his lateness to an internal cause. Finally, an observer looks for consistency in a person’s actions. Does the person respond the same way over time? Coming in 10 minutes late for work is not perceived in the same way for an employee who hasn’t been late for several months as it is for an employee who is late two or three times a week. The more consistent the behavior, the more we are inclined to attribute it to internal causes. If an employee, Kim Randolph, generally performs at about the same level on related tasks as she does on her current task (low distinctiveness), other employees frequently perform differently— better or worse— than Kim on that task (low consensus), and Kim’s performance on this current task is consistent over time (high consistency); then anyone judging Kim’s work will likely hold her primarily responsible for her task performance (internal attribution).  When we make judgments about the behavior of other people, we tend to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal or personal factors.  This fundamental attribution error can explain why a sales manager is prone to attribute the poor performance of her sales agents to laziness rather than to the innovative product line introduced by a competitor.  Individuals and organizations also tend to attribute their own successes to internal factors such as ability or effort, while blaming failure on external factors such as bad luck or unproductive co-workers. This is the self-serving bias.  Self-serving bias The tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors and put the blame for failures on external factors.  A U.S. News & World Report study showed the power of self serving bias. Researchers asked one group of people “If someone sues you and you win the case, should he pay your legal costs?” Eighty-five percent responded “yes.” Another group was asked “If you sue someone and lose the case, should you pay his costs?” Only 44 percent answered “yes.”  The evidence on cultural differences in perception is mixed, but most suggest there are differences across cultures in the attributions people make.  One study found Korean managers less likely to use the self-serving bias—they tended to accept responsibility for group failure “because I was not a capable leader” instead of attributing failure to group members.  On the other hand, Asian managers are more likely to blame institutions or whole organizations, whereas Western observers believe individual managers should get blame or praise. Common Shortcuts in Judging Others  Selective Perception - Any characteristic that makes a person, an object, or an event stand out will increase the probability we will perceive it.  Why? Because it is impossible for us to assimilate everything we see; we can take in only certain stimuli.  Selective perception: The tendency to selectively interpret what one sees on the basis of one’s interests, background, experience, and attitudes  This explains why you’re more likely to notice cars like your own, or why a boss may reprimand some people and not others doing the same thing. Because we can’t observe everything going on about us, we engage in selective perception.  Halo Effect: The tendency to draw a general impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristic  Contrast Effects: Evaluation of a person’s characteristics that is affected by comparisons with other people recently encountered who rank higher or lower on the same characteristics.  Stereotyping: Judging someone on the basis of one’s perception of the group to which that person belongs. The link between perception and decision making. Decision making occurs as a reaction to a problem. Unfortunately, most problems don’t come neatly labeled “problem.” One person’s problem is another person’s satisfactory state of affairs. Every decision requires us to interpret and evaluate information. We typically receive data from multiple sources and need to screen, process, and interpret them. Which data are relevant to the decision, and which are not? Our perceptions will answer that question. Overconfidence Bias  People are only 50% times right, for all the times they claimed they are 90% sure. Anchoring Bias  The anchoring bias is a tendency to fixate on initial information and fail to adequately adjust for subsequent information.  It occurs because our mind appears to give a disproportionate amount of emphasis to the first information it receives.  Any time a negotiation takes place, so does anchoring. Confirmation Bias  The rational decision-making process assumes we objectively gather information. But we don’t. We selectively gather it. The confirmation bias represents a specific case of selective perception: we seek out information that reaffirms our past choices, and we discount information that contradicts them. Availability Bias  The availability bias can also explain why managers doing performance appraisals give more weight to recent employee behaviors than to behaviors of 6 or 9 months earlier Hindsight Bias  The hindsight bias is the tendency to believe falsely, after the outcome is known, that we’d have accurately predicted it.  When we have accurate feedback on the outcome, we seem pretty good at concluding it was obvious.