[Solution] Perceptual Processes and the Role of Attributions in Organizations
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Author: Emily Carter
Perception and Individual Behavior
Attitudes are based in part on what an individual knows about a situation, but what does anyone really "know"? The information people receive about their environment arrives in their brains through the filter of their perceptions, and different people perceive events and situations differently.
Select the term that best completes the following sentence.
The mechanism through which people observe behavior and arrive at conclusions about its causes is known as .
View Explanation
Attribution is the term used to describe the way in which individuals determine whether behavior —their own or others'— is noteworthy and, if so, what the causes of it might be.
What is stereotyping?
- Believing that everyone who shares one characteristic also shares one or more other characteristics
- Ignoring information that does not match one's preexisting ideas
- Weighting the most recent information one has acquired more heavily than older information
- Deciding that if a situation has one positive aspect, it must be positive overall
View Explanation
Human perception is prone to bias. One such bias is stereotyping, which is a tendency to group people according to a single characteristic and then believe everyone in that group is alike in other ways as well.
The other choices describe other forms of bias: selective perception, halo effect, and recency bias.
You notice that someone behaves differently than other people in the same situation. What is occurring here?
- Low consistency
- Low consensus
- Low distinctiveness
View Explanation
When someone's behavior stands out as different from that of people in a similar situation, that behavior exemplifies low consensus. The observer is therefore more likely to wonder about the cause of that behavior.
