1. Social Perception and Attributions

2. Perception: An Information Processing Model
Stage 1
Selective Attention/Comprehension
Stage 2
Encoding and Simplification
Stage 3
Storage and
Retention
Stage 4
Retrieval and Response
A B C D E F
Competing environmental stimuli
People
Events
Objects
Interpretation and categorization
Judgments and decisions
A C F
Memory C
Perception is a mental and cognitive process that enables us to interpret and understand our surroundings.
This is an basic four stage information processing model of perception.
The first three stages tell us how information is observed and stored in memory. The fourth stage involves converting mental representations into judgments and decisions.
Stage 1: Selective Attention/Comprehension
- people are continuously bombarded by physical & social stimuli in the environment. We aren’t able to fully comprehend or process all the information available, so we selectively attend to subsets of these environmental stimuli. We pay attention to salient stimuli- things that stand out.
Attention is the process of becoming consciously aware of something or someone. Your needs and goals will dictate which stimuli are salient, and we all have a tendency to pay more attention to negative rather than positive information.
For example, when eating in a busy restaurant we selectively attend to the people we are with in order to listen to them and are able to screen out all of the other conversations going on around us. Actually there have been studies that found that in situations like that, if someone says you’re name, you will automatically respond suggesting that the “noise” we are screening out still is perceptible but is only distracting if it is particularly meaningful to us. This is called the cocktail party phenomena.
Stage 2: Encoding & Simplification
Before information can be stored, we must interpret or translate it into mental representations. To do this, when we perceive stimuli, we assign pieces of the information to cognitive categories – mental depository containing a number of objects that are considered equivalent.
People, events, and objects are interpreted and categorized by comparing their characteristics with schemata. A schema is a person’s mental picture or summary of a particular event or type of stimulus.
So this chart shows that we are exposed to A through F but we only interpret and categorize a subset of that stimuli, namely A,C, & F. During this interpretation process we try to organize the information into cognitive categories that we have already developed. A schema is a person’s mental picture or summary of a particular event or type of stimulus.
For example, when you need to determine when to arrive at the airport to make your flight on time. You will go through the “airport” schema which includes, standing in line to check in, checking your bag, going through security, lining up when your row is called, handing the attendant your boarding pass, and so on.
Schema’s really help us in encoding information. For example, did anyone try the exercise in your book? Basically there is a paragraph that is very difficult to understand unless you have a category or frame of reference for what it is talking about. You may find this happening when you enter a conversation that is already in progress. It will probably take some time to get the jist of the topic being discussed because the individuals will have a shared understanding of the context but you won’t.
Stage 3: Storage & Retention
Long-term memory consists of separate but connected categories containing different types of information. Information passes among the categories. We believe long-term memory is made up of three compartments containing categories of information about events (specific & general), semantic materials (info about the world), and people (individuals or groups).
Stage 4: Retrieval & Response
Finally, we rely on the information in our memory when we need to make judgments and decisions. For example, we may have already determined a summary judgment about something and need to recall it, or we need to integrate information from various parts of our memory to make a decision. Ultimately, judgments and decisions are outcome of us retrieving, interpreting, and integrating categorical information stored in long-term memory.
Figure 7.1

3. Stereotypes
Stereotype is an individual’s set of beliefs about the characteristics of a group of people
Stereotype is an individual’s set of beliefs about the characteristics of a group of people
Discussion question
What are some commonly held stereotypes?
Have student offer answers. They may be reluctant so reinforce the fact that stereotypes are a product of our society and it doesn’t make you a bad person if you’ve heard of them.

4. Characteristics of Stereotypes
They are not always negative
Men are ambitious
Asians are smart
May or may not be accurate
Older workers are more accident prone
Disabled workers cost a lot of money to accommodate
Women are more emotional
Can lead to poor decisions and discrimination
Asians are smart.
Men are more ambitious than women.
These are commonly held stereotypes but they aren’t necessarily negative. For example, some people use the commonly held belief that people who wear glasses are studious to there advantage by wearing non-prescription glass to job interviews to hope that they are perceived as smarter.
May or may not be accurate.
Research suggests that the following stereotypes are actually not accurate.
Older workers are more accident prone
Older workers: Evidence indicates that older workers have greater job satisfaction, job involvement, internal work motivation, organizational commitment and are less accident prone.
The relationship between age and job performance is more complex. Age is positively related to performance for younger employees (ages 25-30), but then plateaus. Older workers are not less productive. Research indicates that age and turnover are negatively related. Similarly, age was inversely related to voluntary and involuntary absenteeism.
Disabled workers cost a lot of money to accommodate
Nearly 20% of the accommodations cost nothing, and 50% cost less than $500.
Women are more emotional
What do we know about this from our discussion of emotions?
Women feel emotions the same as men but they express their emotions more frequently so in some senses you can see where there is some truth to this stereotype.
In addition, research has shown that holding other variables constant, men do have an advantage in promotion decisions over women, but not hiring. This would suggest that perhaps stereotypes of the man climbing the corporate ladder are being used whereas, women in high-level positions is not congruent with one’s stereotype.
The issue really isn’t whether or not a stereotype has any basis in reality because the issue is that we are all individuals and want to be judged based on our personal characteristics, not those that are assumed about us.
Can lead to poor decisions and discrimination
So using stereotypes, whether good or bad can lead to making inaccurate decisions. For example, before starting an interviewer training course for a large company in Dallas Texas the trainer overheard a participant say to her neighbor that she didn’t really need this class because she knew how to make good hiring decisions. She just looked at the first 3 digits of their social security number to see if they were born in Texas and if not, she didn’t hire them. She was employing her stereotype that only those people born in Texas could be effective employees.

5. Commonly Found Perceptual Errors
Halo
Leniency
Central Tendency
Recency Effect
Contrast Effect

7. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Pygmalion Effect
Someone’s high expectations for another person result in high performance
Galatea Effect
An individual’s high self-expectations lead to high performance
Golem Effect
Loss in performance due to low leader expectations
The Pygmalion effect comes from the Greek myth where a sculptor, Pygmalion, hated women yet fell in love with an ivory statue he carved of a beautiful woman. He prayed to the goddess Aphrodite to bring her to life and she did. The management field has adapted this idea to suggest that energy with regard to thoughts, then translates into behaviors that promote one’s expectations or desires and it makes them come true.
Many studies have shown this effect, when people are told something positive about someone, that individual’s outcome is likely to be higher because the high expectations from the teacher, manager, etc. change the nature of the interaction and experience to positively advantage the person. The same effect has been shown to work in the negative direction.
Let’s look at a model of how the self-fulfilling prophecy works

8. A Model of the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Supervisor
expectancy 5 1
Leadership 4
Performance 6
Subordinate
self-
expectancy 2 3
Motivation
High supervisory expectancy produces better leadership
Leading employees to develop higher self-expectations
Higher expectations motivate workers to exert greater effort
Thus increasing performance and supervisory expectancies
The self-fulfilling prophecy works in both positive and negative directions. The Golem effect represents the negative side of the performance enhancing process.

9. Causes of Behavior
Internal factors – Personal characteristics that cause behavior (e.g., ability, effort)
External factors – Environmental characteristics that cause behavior (e.g., task difficulty, good/bad luck)
When we make attributions, they can either be internal or external. In other words we can attribute a behavior to internal causes or external causes.
Internal factors – Personal characteristics that cause behavior (e.g., ability, effort)
External factors – Environmental characteristics that cause behavior (e.g., task difficulty, good/bad luck)
Why is this important in a work setting? Well, if your performance for a quarter falls below expectations, your manager may attribute that to your poor sales ability or to an external factor like bad weather conditions preventing you from being able to meet with customers.
If your supervisor attributes it to your poor ability, what is likely to happen to your performance ratings?
They will go down. So researchers have studied what factors will determine which kind of attribution we’ll make. Kelley has a model of causal attribution and he says that the internal or external attribution can be predicted based on three types of information… consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness.

10. Kelley’s Attribution Model
Consensus – Involves the comparison of an individual’s behavior with that of his or her peers
Low
High
Individual Performance
Individual Performance
Kelley hypothesized that people make attributions based on other information they know about the situation
The model suggests that people make causal attributions after gathering information on three dimensions of behavior: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency.
Consensus involves a comparison on the similarity of the behavior of the person being judged to that of his/her peers or other people.– think of the comparison being people
So when people act similarly to their peers, it is more likely that an external attribution would be made regarding their behavior.
On this chart, the left graph indicates low consensus because the individual performance levels are different. The right graph indicates that the consensus is high because the levels of performance are about the same for each of the people.
When consensus is high we lean toward external attribution. When consensus is low we lean toward internal attribution. A B C D E A B C D E
People
People

11. Kelley’s Theory of Attribution
Distinctiveness is determined by comparing a person’s behavior on one task with his or her behavior on other tasks.
Low
High
Individual Performance
Individual Performance
The second dimension of Kelley’s model is distinctiveness. Distinctiveness is determined by comparing a person’s behavior on one task with his or her behavior on other tasks. Think of the comparison as task-to-task
When a person perform about the same on each of five tasks, this indicates low distinctiveness.
When one person performs differently on each of five tasks, this indicates high distinctiveness.
When we see high distinctiveness, we tend to attribute behavior to the external environment, not internally or to the person. A B C D E A B C D E
Tasks
Tasks

12. Kelley’s Theory of Attribution
Consistency is determined by judging if the individual’s performance on a given task is consistent over time.
Time
Individual Performance
Low
High
The 3rd dimension in Kelley’s model is consistency. Consistency is determined by judging if the individual's performance on a given task is consistent over time. Think of the comparison as time.
The sales person in the left graph is not consistently closing sales throughout the month. This would lead us to believe that the person is experiencing something during that dip in performance—most likely something external happened to impact performance. Low consistency leads to external attributions.
In the graph on the left, the sales person is consistently closing sales throughout the month. This leads us to believe that internal causes make this person a success. High consistency leads to internal attributions.

13. How Kelley’s Model Works
External Attribution
High consensus
High distinctiveness
Low consistency
Internal Attribution
Low consensus
Low distinctiveness
High consistency

14. Attributional Tendencies
Fundamental Attribution Bias ignoring environmental factors that affect behavior
Your poor behavior is caused by you
Self-Serving Bias taking more personal responsibility for success than failure
My poor behavior is caused by something else.
Fundamental Attribution Bias ignoring environmental factors that affect behavior
Your poor behavior is caused by you
Self-Serving Bias taking more personal responsibility for success than failure
My poor behavior is caused by something else.
This is an important tendency to become aware of, especially during performance appraisal discussions. Both parties have to realize that the other is naturally going to make opposing attributions to the one’s you make. A supervisor is going to have the tendency to look at your poor performance as attributable to you rather than the environment and you will do the reverse (attribute it to the environment, not yourself).