Ch.6 Perception and Individual Decision Making

Question 1

Perception

Answer 1

A process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions to give meaning to their environment.

Question 2

Perceiver

Answer 2

When you look at a target, your interpretation of what you see is influenced by your personal characteristics attitudes, personality, motives, interests, past experiences, and expectations. In some ways, we hear what we want to hear and we see what we want to see not because it’s the truth, but because it conforms to our thinking. For instance, research indicates that supervisors perceived employees who started work earlier in the day as more conscientious and therefore as higher performers; however, supervisors who were night owls themselves were less likely to make that erroneous assumption.

Question 3

Target

Answer 3

The characteristics of the target also affect what we perceive. Because we don’t look at targets in isolation, the relationship of a target to its back-ground influences perception, as does our tendency to group close things and similar things together.

Question 4

Context

Answer 4

Context matters too. The time at which we see an object or event can influence our attention, as can location, light, heat, or situational factors. For instance, you may not notice someone dressed up for a formal event that you attended on a Saturday night. Yet if you were to notice that person dressed the same way for your Monday morning management class, he or she would likely catch your attention, if the students do not normally wear formal attire to class. Neither the perceiver nor the target has changed between Saturday night and Monday morning, but the situation is different.

Question 5

attribution theory

Answer 5

An attempt to explain the ways we judge people differently, depending on the meaning we attribute to a behavior, such as determining whether an individual’s behavior is internally or externally caused.

Question 6

fundamental attribution error

Answer 6

The tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal factors when making judgments about the behavior of others.

Question 7

self-serving bias

Answer 7

The tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors and put the blame for failures on external factors.

Question 8

selective perception

Answer 8

The tendency to choose to interpret what one sees based on one’s interests, background, experience, and attitudes.

Question 9

halo effect

Answer 9

The tendency to draw a positive general impression about an individual based on a single characteristic.

Question 10

horns effect

Answer 10

The tendency to draw a negative general impression about an individual based on a single characteristic.

Question 11

contrast effect

Answer 11

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.

Question 12

stereotyping

Answer 12

Judging someone based on one’s perception of the group to which that person belongs.

Question 13

heuristics

Answer 13

We deal with our complex world’s unmanageable number of stimuli by using stereotypes or shortcuts called heuristics to make decisions quickly

Question 14

self-fulfilling prophecy and Pygmalion effect

Answer 14

A situation in which a person inaccurately perceives a second person and the resulting expectations cause the second person to behave in ways consistent with the original perception.

Question 15

decisions

Answer 15

Choices made from among two or more alternatives.

Question 16

problem

Answer 16

A discrepancy between the current state of affairs and some desired state

Question 17

rational

Answer 17

Characterized by making consistent, value-maximizing choices within specified constraints

Question 18

rational decision-making model

Answer 18

A decision-making model that describes how individuals should behave to maximize some outcome

Question 19

bounded rationality

Answer 19

A process of making decisions by constructing simplified models that extract the essential features from problems without capturing all their complexity.

Question 20

intuitive decision making

Answer 20

An unconscious process created out of distilled experience.

Question 21

anchoring bias

Answer 21

A tendency to fixate on initial information, from which one then fails to adjust adequately for subsequent information.

Question 22

confirmation bias

Answer 22

The tendency to seek out information that reaffirms past choices and to discount information that contradicts past judgments.

Question 23

availability bias

Answer 23

The tendency for people to base their judgments on information that is readily available to them.

Question 24

escalation of commitment

Answer 24

An increased commitment to a previous decision despite negative information

Question 25

randomness error

Answer 25

the tendency of individuals to believe that they can predict the outcome of random events

Question 26

risk aversion

Answer 26

The tendency to prefer a sure gain of a moderate amount over a riskier outcome, even if the riskier outcome might have a higher expected payoff.

Question 27

hindsight bias

Answer 27

The tendency to believe falsely, after an outcome of an event is actually known, that one would have accurately predicted that outcome.

Question 28

utilitarianism

Answer 28

An ethical perspective in which decisions are made to provide the greatest good for all.

Question 29

whistle-blowers

Answer 29

Individuals who report unethical practices by their employer to outsiders

Question 30

deonance

Answer 30

A perspective in which ethical decisions are made because you “ought to” in order to be consistent with moral norms, principles, standards, rules, or laws.

Question 31

behavioral ethics

Answer 31

Analyzing how people behave when confronted with ethical dilemmas

Question 32

creativity

Answer 32

The ability to produce novel and useful ideas

Question 33

Creative Behavior- problem formulation

Answer 33

The stage of creative behavior that involves identifying a problem or opportunity requiring a solution that is yet unknown.
For example, Marshall Carbee and John Bennett founded Eco Safety Products after discovering that even paints declared safe by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emit-ted hazardous chemical compounds. Thus, Eco’s development of artist-safe soy-based paint began with identifying a safety problem with paints currently on the market

Question 34

Creative Behavior- Information gathering.

Answer 34

The stage of creative behavior when possible solutions to a problem incubate in an individual’s mind.
Information gathering leads us to identifying innovation opportunities. Niklas Laninge of Hoa’s Tool Shop, a Stockholm-based company that helps organizations become more innovative, argues that creative information gathering means thinking beyond usual routines and comfort zones

Question 35

Creative Behavior-Idea generation

Answer 35

The process of creative behavior that involves developing possible solutions to a problem from relevant information and knowledge.
Increasingly, though, idea gen-eration is collaborative. For example, when NASA engineers developed the idea for landing a spacecraft on Mars, they did so collaboratively. Before com-ing up with the Curiosity—an SUV-sized rover that lands on Mars from a sky crane—the team spent 3 days scribbling potential ideas on whiteboards.

Question 36

Creative Behavior-idea evaluation

Answer 36

The process of creative behavior involving the evaluation of potential solutions to problems to identify the best one.
“What’s the best way to come up with creative ideas? You ask for them. So we are going to crowd source the design and colors of our uniforms.”108 Generally, you want those who evalu-ate ideas to be different from those who generate them, to eliminate the obvious biases.

Question 37

Summary

Answer 37

Individuals base their behavior not on the way their external environment actually is but rather on the way they see it or believe it to be. An understanding of the way people make decisions can help us explain and predict behavior, but few important decisions are simple or unambiguous enough for the rational model’s assumptions to apply. We find individuals looking for solutions that satisfice rather than optimize, injecting biases and prejudices into the decision process and relying on intuition. Managers should encourage creativity in employees and teams to create a route to innovative decision making.