Chapter 6 - Perception and Individual Decision Making Flashcards
A process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.
Perception
An attempt to determine whether an individual’s behavior is internally or externally caused.
Attribution Theory
The tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal factors when making judgments about the behavior of others.
Fundamental Attribution Error
The tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors and put the blame for failures on external factors.
Self-Serving Bias
The tendency to selectively interpret what one sees on the basis of one’s interests, background, experience, and attitudes.
Selective Perception
The tendency to draw a general impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristic.
Halo Effect
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.
Contrast Effect
Judging someone on the basis of one’s perception of the group to which that person belongs.
Stereotyping
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.
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Choices made from among two or more alternatives.
Decisions
A discrepancy between the current state of affairs and some desired state.
Problem
Characterized by making consistent, value-maximizing choices within specified constraints.
Rational
A decision-making model that describes how individuals should behave in order to maximize some outcome.
Rational Decision-Making Model
A process of making decisions by constructing simplified models that extract the essential features from problems without capturing all their complexity.
Bounded Rationality
An unconscious process created out of distilled experience.
Intuitive Decision Making
A tendency to fixate on initial information, from which one then fails to adequately adjust for subsequent information.
Anchoring Bias
The tendency to seek out information that reaffirms past choices and to discount information that contradicts past judgments.
Confirmation Bias
The tendency for people to base their judgments on information that is readily available to them.
Availability Bias
An increased commitment to a previous decision in spite of negative information.
Escalation of Commitment
The tendency of individuals to believe that they can predict the outcome of random events.
Randomness Error
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.
Risk Aversion
The tendency to believe falsely, after an outcome of an event is actually known, that one would have accurately predicted that outcome.
Hindsight Bias
A system in which decisions are made to provide the greatest good for the greatest number.
Utilitarianism
Individuals who report unethical practices by their employer to outsiders.
Whistle-Blowers
Analyzing how people actually behave when confronted with ethical dilemmas.
Behavioral Ethics
The ability to produce novel and useful ideas.
Creativity
The proposition that creativity involves three stages: causes (creative potential and creative environment), creative behavior, and creative outcomes (innovation).
Three-Stage Model of Creativity
The stage of creative behavior that involves identifying a problem or opportunity requiring a solution that is as yet unknown.
Problem Formulation
The stage of creative behavior when possible solutions to a problem incubate in an individual’s mind.
Information Gathering
The process of creative behavior that involves developing possible solutions to a problem from relevant information and knowledge.
Idea Generation
The process of creative behavior involving the evaluation of potential solutions to problems to identify the best one.
Idea Evaluation
