Topic 3: Perception, Attributes, and Diversity Flashcards
(34 cards)
What is perception?
Perception is the process of interpreting the messages of our 5 senses to provide meaning to our environment. People frequently base their decisions on their perception of reality, even if their perception is flawed.
What are the three factors that influence perception?
1) Perceiver
-Experience: Past experiences lead the perceiver to develop expectations, and those expectations affect current perceptions. Experience is one of the most important characteristics perceivers do to develop their impressions of the target.
-Beneficiaries of discrimination are less perceptive of it than those who are harmed by it.
-Needs/Motivational State: Perceivers who have been deprived of food tend to “see” more edible things in ambiguous pictures than wellfed observers.
-Emotional State: Someone who doesn’t get the promotion they wanted may see someone trying to console them as being condescending. An already angry person will be more likely to see malintent of another person.
2) Situation: Factors like time, work setting, and social environment can change how things are perceived.
-Your boss makes a comment about your performance the week you’re up for promotion, so you pay a lot more attention to that comment.
-An employee’s sarcasm may be seen as humorous in a casual setting but disrespectful in a formal meeting.
3) Target: The person or object being perceived will be the target.
-Ambiguity, distinctiveness, motion, sound, and background features affect how the target is viewed.
-People are more likely to interpret targets based on stereotypes or assumptions if the target is ambiguous.
What are the three main goals of social cognition?
1) Seeking Accuracy: the desire to form correct understandings of other people as well as the situation we are in.
-Managers want to evaluate their employees performance fairly.
-Employees try to assess workplace norms, expectations, or leadership behaviour.
2) Conserving mental Effort: the tendency to simplify thinking to save cognitive resources.
-In organizational behaviour, people use heuristics, stereotypes, or past experiences to quickly assess coworkers and situations.
-This can lead to errors like biased hiring or overlooking diverse talent.
3) Managing Self-Image: the desire to see oneself in a positive light, and to have others see them in a positive light.
-People often assume their successes are due to their own efforts, but blame external circumstances for their failures.
-If you do well on an exam, you’ll say “I crushed it.” But if you do poorly, you’ll say “that exam was very unfair” or say “the teacher sucks.”
What is social identity theory?
-Social identity theory suggests that people form perceptions of themselves based on their personal characteristics/personal identity and on their social characteristics/social identity.
-Our personal identity is based on our interest, abilities, and character traits.
-Our social identity is based on our perception that we belong to various social groups such as our gender, nationality, religion, occupation, and so on.
-These two types of identities help to answer the question “who am I.”
-E.g. you meet a man who writes poetry… is he more likely to be an ivy-league English professor or a truck driver.
What is the goal of “seeking accuracy” driven by? What are the accuracy strategies uses to acheive this goal?
-The goal of seeking accuracy is driven by our desire to make correct judgements, hiring the right people, and giving fair and accurate feedback to employees.
-It’s also driven by a desire to control our life outcomes, as we want to be able to predict and influence key events in our life such as workplace dynamics, and career growth.
-To acheive this goal, we use three key accuracy strategies:
1) Using Attributional Logic
2) Discounting Principle
3) Augmenting Principle
What is attributional logic? What criteria do perceivers use with attributional logic?
-Attributional logic is used to understand why a past event occured. To answer this, perceivers use three criteria:
1) Consensus
-This involves asking how common the behaviour is: does everybody do it?
-High consensus: If many other people behave the same way, then the cause is likely external.
-Low consensus: If others don’t behave that way, the cause is likely internal.
-For instance, if everyone is late on a particular day due to a transit delay, it is assumed to not be the employees fault.
2) Distinctiveness
-This involves asking the question does this behaviour only occur in this situation.
-High distinctiveness: If the behavior is unique to one situation, the cause is likely internal.
-Low distinctiveness: If the behaviour occurs in many situations, it is likely an internal cause.
3) Consistency
-This involves asking the question: does this behaviour occur repeatedly over time?
-High consistency: If the behaviour happens often, the cause is likely internal.
-Low consistency: If the behaviour is rare, the cause is likely external.
What is the discounting principle?
-The discounting principle states that the more potential causes there are for an event, the less confident we can be in any conclusion.
-Think about how defense attorneys try to say “isn’t it possible” to a lot of different potential equations, to try to create “a shadow of a doubt.”
What is the augmenting principle?
-The augmenting principle states that we assign more importance to a cause when an outcome occurs despite the presence of opposing forces.
-When someone succeeds even though the situation made it difficult, we’re more likely to attribute the success to strong internal traits like determination, skill, or intelligence.
What is the goal of “conserving mental effort” driven by? What are the accuracy strategies uses to acheive this goal?
-We often conserve mental effort because there is too much social data to constantly be processing things, and we have limited attentional capacity, meaning that our brains can’t deeply analyze every person or situation.
-To avoid evaluating everything, we use mental shortcuts, which can unfortunately lead to biases and errors.
-The three key simplification strategies include:
1) Primacy/Recency Effects
2) Confirmation Bias
3) Categorizing/Social Identity–ties to social identity theory
What is the primacy effect?
The primacy effect suggests that we rely on early cues or first impressions to judge people.
What is the recency effect?
the recency effect suggests that people give undue weight to the cues that occured most recently.
What is confirmation bias?
-Confirmation bias states that we pay more attention to events that are relevant to our expectations.
-Additionally, we interpret ambiguous events in ways that support our expectations.
-And we remember events in such a way that they are consistent with our expectations.
What is the goal of “managing self image” driven by? What are the accuracy strategies uses to acheive this goal?
-Managing self image is driven be a desire to see ourselves as competent, and a desire to see ourselves as having good relationships.
-To acheive this, we create self serving attributions, which directly ties to self-serving bias.
-We also create social comparisons, where we compete down. We say “I am better than that guy” who is not really doing very well.
What is the self serving bias?
-We attribute successes to our ability & effort
-We attribute failures to external factors
-We see ourselves as better than average
-We overestimate how much others agree with us
-We are unrealistically optimistic about our future
-We overestimate the commonality of our flaws
-We underestimate the commonality of our abilities
-The self serving bias comes from our desire and tendency to measure our self perception.
What is the fundamental attribution error(also known as correspondence bias)?
-When understanding the behaviour of other people, we often over-estimate the influence of other people’s personality, and underestimate situational factors.
-Think back to the in-class activity. People in the high-resource group are more likely to judge those in the low-resource groups projects, overestimating personal flaws, and underestimating situational factors
-Also remember how we judged the Ms. America contestant.
What is the actor-observer effect?
-The actor-observer effect highlights how actors and observers often view the causes for the actor’s behaviour very differently.
-The observer may be busy committing the fundamental attribution error, over-estimating the influence of other people’s personality, and underestimate situational factors.
-On the other hand, the actor will be highly sensitive to environmental events.
What is diversity?
Diversity is the ways in which all people differ. Diversity is also having lots of different types of people.
What is equity?
Equity is the fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all people. One’s identity cannot and should not be able to predict their career outcomes.
What is inclusion?
Inclusion is a variety of people having power, a voice, and decision-making authority.
What is absolute deprivation, and what is relative deprivation?
-Absolute deprivation is the absence of requisites for survival.
-Relative deprivation is the subjective view that oneself is unfairly disadvantaged compared to others.
-One may experience deprivation, and be able to perservere past that, because the person will say “this sucks, but that’s just how it is.”
-But if one experiences relative deprivation, the person will fixate on the unfairness of their situation to such an extent that they find it challenging to overcome their situation.
What is the ABC model of attitudes?
1) Affect: This is an emotional response or feeling towards a group. This may result in a manager feeling uneasy about hiring someone from a different cultural background. Overall, affect leads to prejudice.
2) Behaviour: This is actions or behaviours based on an individuals membership to a particular group. Overall, behaviour leads to discrimination.
3) Cognition: This is beliefs or assumptions about a group’s characteristics. Overall, cognition leads to stereotypes.
What is stereotype threat?
Stereotype threat is the fear of confirming a negative stereotype of one’s social group. This fear can impair performance, focus, and confidence–even if the individual is highly capable. Stereotype threat is heightened for groups lower in power.
What is implicit bias?
-Implicit bias refers to unconscious attitudes or stereotypes that affect how we understand, evaluate, and interact with others–without our awareness or intentional control.
-A strong example of implicit bias was when they sent out resumes to HR with different cultural names and experience from different countries, and there were vastly different responses.
What are the three key evidence-based interventions to promote inclusivity for marginalized employees?
1) Affinity Groups: These are voluntary employee-led groups based on shared identity such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or diability.
-This helps to reduce a feeling of isolation, and it promotes diversity-sensitive decision making.
2) Mentorship: This involves pairing marginalized employees with mentors of their same marginalized group. This helps to increase career progress for members of this group, and counteracts unequal access to information networks.
3) Cohort Hiring: this involves hiring multiple individuals from underrepresented groups together. This helps to reduce tokenism and social isolation. Studies showed that people who experienced cohort hiring are likely to stay at the company together.
