Lecture 4

Question 1

Perception

Answer 1

A process by which individuals orgamize a interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment

Question 2

Attribution Theory: Judging others

Answer 2

Our perception and judgement of other is significantly influenced by our assumption of the other person’s internal state.

Question 3

Fundamental Attribution Error

Answer 3

-Tendency to understumate the influence of the external factor and overestimate heinfluence of the internal factors, when making judgements about the behaviour of others.

We blame peopl first, not the situation.

Question 4

Self-Serving bias

Answer 4

The tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors while putting the blame for failures on external factors

Its our succes but their failure

Question 5

Halo effect

Answer 5

Drawing a general impression about an individual on the basis of a single (central) characteristics

Question 6

Selective Perception

Answer 6

People selectively interpret what they see on the basis of their interest, background, experience, and attitudes

Question 7

Employment Interview

Answer 7

• Perceptual biases of raters affect the accuracy of interviewers’ judgments of applicants
• Formed in a single glance- 1/10 of a second

Question 8

Performance expectations

Answer 8

-Self-fulfilling prophecy (Pygmalion effect): The lower or higher performance of employees reflects preconceived leader expectations about employee capabilities

Question 9

Performance evaluations

Answer 9

• Appraisals are often the subjective (judgmental) perceptions of appraisers of another employee’s job performance
• Critical impact on employees

Question 10

Different ways to make decision

Answer 10

• Rational Analysis
• Bounded rationality/Heuristics
• Intuition

Question 11

Rational analysis

Answer 11

1 Define the problem
2 Identify decisions criteria
3 weight the criteria
4 Generate alternatives
5 Rate each alternative on each criterion
6 Compute the optimal decision, and select it

Question 12

Bounded rtionality

Answer 12

• People want to be rational but their analytic ability and time is constrained
• Bounded rationality involves taking cognitive shortcuts to make quasi rational decisions

Question 13

Organizational Constraints

Answer 13

-Performance evaluation
Managerial evaluation criteria pre-determined
-Reward Systems
Managers will make the decision with the greatest personal payoff for them
-Formal Regulations
Limit the alternative choices of decision makers
-System-imposed time constraints
Restict ability to gather or evaluate info
-Historical Precendents
Past decisions influence current decisions

Question 14

When to use Intuition

Answer 14

• Plenty of experience and knowledge (domain-knowledge)
• Ill-sructured, complex decisions
• Information Overload

Question 15

Three “Meta-biases” that result in decision biases

Answer 15

1 Availability shortcut
we dont want to think too hard
Tendency to bade judgments on the info that is readily available leads to over or underestimation

2 Self-enhancement
We want to feel good about ourselves

3 Illusion of control
Belief that the world could be understoon, predicted, and controlled to a greater degree than its actually can.

Question 16

Anchoring/Prmacy bias

Answer 16

The tendency to fixate on initial info and fail to adequately adjust to subsequent info

Question 17

conformation bias

Answer 17

The tendency to search, interpret, and remember info in a way that confirms preconceptions

This also results in us being more skeptical of the info that disconfirms our initial opion

Question 18

Escalation of commitment

a.k.a the sunk cost fallacy

Answer 18

The phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong. (throwing good money after bad)

Greater escalation occurs when prior decisions were public

Question 19

egocentric accounting

Answer 19

Occurs when people claim more responsibility for themselves for the result of a joint action tha am outside observer would credit them

This bias occurs at work and at homw

Question 20

Better-than-average effect

Answer 20

It describes the tendency for peope to evauate themseves as ‘better than average’ on desirable skills, characteristics or behaviours

Question 21

Lower self esteem

Answer 21

Lower self esteem = More accurate self appraisal

People who have low selfesteem are generally accurate in assesing their competencies relative to others

The rest of us have inflated self images!

Question 22

Illusory correlations

Answer 22

Seeing the relationsip one expects in a set of data even when no such relationships exists

Question 23

Blame the victim effect

Answer 23

Holding the victims of a crime, an accident, or any type of abusive maltreatment to be entirely or partially responsible for the unfortunate incident